I also have leisure to do some fun things. My goal last week was to bring the camera to campus every day. I planned to stroll around the lake once per day, looking for subjects to photograph. I anticipated another Lake Pamela series like the one this past November. I was going to discuss one new picture here every day: what I had learned in identifying the plant or animal, what I had observed about its behavior, what challenge I had faced getting the shot. I planned to be disciplined. I always over-schedule free time, though, and despite lugging the heavy camera to campus, I never got out to the lake. Yesterday, however, I finally managed the short hike at lunch time. It was a good trip; I have enough photos to write a whole week's worth of blog posts [something else I finally have the time to do!].
I hadn't been down to the lake to observe and photograph since a Saturday in early April when I accompanied Elizabeth back to campus for a presentation she got coerced into giving. On that trip, the lake was overrun with male blue dasher dragonflies:
Although I did spot a few yesterday, I was amazed at the high number of other species. According to Dragonflies [an excellent read], dragonfly species appear "in a predictable sequence." If this blog is acting in part as field notes, blue dashers are at their ascendancy here in Central Florida in late spring. Now at mid-May, a very common sight is Halloween pennants, Celithemis eponina, so named for their Halloween colors of black and orange—I spotted several at Mead Gardens on Sunday, many more at Lake Pamela yesterday. As a side note, Lake Como is still a battleground for blue dashers, Halloween pennants making only rare appearances.
The first Halloween pennant I photographed was exciting. I had admired pictures of this species at other photoblogs but had never seen—let alone digitally captured—a specimen myself. I look at that photo now and dismiss it as not very good. Lake Como, where I took the picture, is a well-groomed lake; the city keeps the grass neatly cut, and workers use weed wackers to tame the unruly plants at the shore, right down to the water's edge. I think the blue dashers are so combative because there are so few perching spots left once the maintenance crew finishes. The aggressive manicuring also means that artistic photographs are difficult to compose. Typically I have to shoot with water behind the subject or mud to the side, getting a hazy, unappealing blue, gray, or brown background [depending on water/sky/ground conditions].
Unlike the neighborhood lake near home, Lake Pamela is unkept and wild near the water. I keep my eyes out for snakes whenever I make the trip around; I always confirm that I'm not standing in a fire ant nest when I stop to shoot. Late last fall, the college hired a firm that came out in haz-mat suits and sprayed the lake shore with chemicals similar to Agent Orange, killing all of the plant life along the edge. But the shore has had several months to repair, and now three or four yards of vegetation on all sides of my subjects provides a much more artistic background. These are four males I captured yesterday, all at Lake Pamela:
I tweaked the amount of contrast on the one above, but the colors are accurate. I almost desaturated to tone down the colors but decided I really liked the vibrancy. This photo will definitely get posted at the photostream, titled something like "A Moment to Pray" or "Little Angel." Dragonflies are both hideous and beautiful; the angle of this shot hides the hairy legs and has the bug positioned like an angel in a Renaissance painting, hovering above some human action below.
This second one is just fun. The dragonfly looks as if he is on a carousel ride, twirling in circles. I imagine that I can see a smile on his face. The reality is that he was balancing and maintaining his perch as gusts of wind came off the lake.
No, this third Halloween pennant is not participating in a karaoke contest. When a dragonfly touches a surface with his feet, he instinctively pulls what he is grasping toward his mouth, usually to feed on the prey he has caught. But even a perch gets a similar embrace. Bad dragonfly table manners, I guess.
I could have cropped this last male much closer to the actual insect, but I like the dreamy grass background and the insight into perspective. If you click one of these images for the full-sized version, then the dragonflies on the computer screen are the size of birds; in reality, they are tiny creatures, this one balancing on a single blade of grass.
The walk around the lake yesterday was very pleasant, the only problem an overzealous [new] security guard who came chasing after me in a golf cart, demanding identification. I should have told him to fuck off, as it is public property, not a military base. I had every right to take pictures as the college isn't [to my knowledge] burying nuclear waste behind the cafeteria as a favor to the President or receiving supplies at the loading dock to build weapons of mass destruction in the chemistry labs. But I was good and gave him my name so that he could radio the command center [a.k.a. the place where one gets parking stickers renewed] and confirm that I was an employee. "We spotted you near the water, ma'am, and needed to know what was going on," he explained. I guess suicides routinely throw themselves off the two-inch "cliff," drowning themselves in three feet of water with expensive cameras in hand.
