The damselflies, dragonflies and hummingbirds were out in force early this morning. They all like the irrigation water, and swarm, play and chase each other around. The dragonflies like to hover over the water and dip their tails in it. I could seen these little ringed ripples in the water, similar to when fish catch insects on the water’s surface, but since I knew there wasn’t fish in it, I had to look really closely to see an almost perfectly camouflaged dragonfly flying over the water dipping its tail in it.

This damselfly drew my attention and allowed me to get within about 2 inches of it with my macro lens. Through the lens I could see it had something in its mouth. After a closer look I could see it had a tiny winged ant. I didn’t know damselflies ate ants. Turns out I had my arm in the ant pile it was plucking ants from, while photographing it. After I got up I felt some biting me, looked at my arm and there were several hundred tiny black ants crawling on me and a couple had taken to biting me. Fortunately, tiny black ant bites are not like big red and black ant stings.

Carry Grant cut quite a figure, backlit by the early morning sun.

The hummingbirds were frisky, and to expose them properly against the early morning back lighting, the colors came out very soft and pastel. I am really happy with the results. There were two of them playing and chasing each other around, but I could not get both of them in focus at the same time.

I went out later in the afternoon, and the dragonflies where having a fiesta. Irrigation water was still standing in the meadow where they were playing, so I had to wade out to them. There were four different types of dragonflies at their fiesta, but only a couple let me get very close to them. One of the red dragonflies let me stick my macro lens in its face, and I got some really close photos. I didn’t have time to finish processing those photos, so I’ll include them later.

The yellow dragonfly in tonight’s set of photos would not let me near it with my macro lens, but it let me get to with in three feet of it with Le Long Lens. I got involved in working its photos because it had a very expressive face, and it’s a color I hadn’t photographed before.