In my garden hangs a 50m length of scarlet webbing, in lieu of a washing line; taking advantage of the fine weather on Saturday I was hanging-out a load of wet clothes, and found that a Dragonfly had parked atop one of the supportbeams, two of its front legs crossed and all of them resting upon an old metal staple, for all the world as if it had ordered a bourbon on the rocks and had settled at the bar for the evening.

Blowing on it a couple of times didn’t shift it, so I reckoned it had decided to stay a while – perhaps it was newly post-larval and drying its wings? – and so I dropped the laundry and dashed in to get the closest camera to hand, a Canon IXUS 700.

After a couple of mediocre shots it struck me that I was stuck with a interesting but wholly artificial nylon setting in ludicrous red, backed by the brilliant green backdrop of the surrounding garden.

So, no naturalistic BBC Nature Photographer of the Year shot, this.

I changed tactics from just “snapping” and decided to work the camera hard, purposely shooting into the sun to force the IXUS to stop-down, pushing the macro tight (in opposition to the small aperture) to force the background out of focus, and using fill-flash while tweaking the metering (my favourite trick du jour) to shorten the exposure further, raise the colour and blacken the background, aiming for a somewhat hyper-real effect.

Bigods it worked:

…and in the end it posed for a full ten minutes, and then left to explore the herbaceous border.

More pictures at [www.crypticide.com]