Outing to the lakes

This is my first post under ‘Macro’ but it could equally well perhaps have appeared under another of my web-site’s headings (‘Eco’, ‘France’, etc.). It’s about a couple of short trips to find and photograph dragonflies. There are a number of places near Penne and Vaour where one can find many species of these most acrobatic and ancient of flying machines. They are very active insects and photographing them is not particularly easy. I absolutely take my hat off to those macro-photographers who manage to capture pictures of dragonflies in flight. If you think the ‘birds-in-flight’ community of nature photographers have a difficult time of it, spare a thought for those who photograph flying insects!

On the technical side, probably the best lens for a day out photographing dragonflies is a macro-telephoto. With this sort of lens you can stand back from these skittish insects and take photos of them perching on branches or grasses without disturbing them. Even so, approaching slowly and avoiding shadowing them is key to getting close enough to them. I have an OM 40-150mm f2.8 Pro lens that can be pushed to 210mm (420mm full-frame equivalent) with the excellent OM 1.4X tele-converter. In bright light, this combo is good for single images of perching insects and could probably be used for some in flight photos. However, I am not showing any ‘in flight’ images here because….well, they were hopeless failures! I guess that had I adopted the ‘Pro-capture’ or ‘spray-and-pray’ approach, I could have had some. However, I have an aversion to wading through 100s of images to find the only one that is spot on!

So I am going to start with some pictures of the lakes in the leisure park at Castelnau Montmirail taken with my iPhone. As a nature photography location it offers a variety of opportunities. One of the smaller lakes has a ‘hide’ from which you can photograph water-fowl. The two larger expanses of water offer dragonflies and many other insects, spiders, water-fowl and amphibia as well as some interesting wild flowers. There is a lido for swimmers but it only occupies a small part of the available space and if you pitch up before about 9:00am, there are very few people about. People are a photographic hazard – they are naturally curious and while it is charming to be engaged in conversation, they do scare the insects away which is OK when it’s a single shot but really annoying when you are half way through a long focus stack!

This is what the lakes looked like when I arrived at 8:00am. There was a light mist and everything looked very beautiful. The first lake houses the lido but as you walk on, even when its being used, you leave most people behind.
One of the other lakes. It sports hundreds of water lilies.

These are some of the shots from my first outing. Like so many leisure parks in France it offers something for everyone; from ‘crazy golf’ through swimming and tennis, to bird watching and fishing. I don’t know who manages the park but I think they are doing a very good job of balancing nature with recreational opportunities. Castelnau Montmirail is a beautiful village – one of the most beautiful in France – ancient and wonderfully preserved with buildings dating back to the 15th century. The village is well worth a visit as is this park. On a weekend in the season, there is a cafe by the lido – a spot for the hot photographer to cool off! I was absolutely exhausted at the end of this first outing. The walking was trivial but I must have knelt down and got up again more than 50 times!

A female Orange Drop Wing (?) – I like this photo because of, rather than despite, the leaves that are hiding the insect. It has a sense of place and time.
Male Orange Drop Wing in a typical hunting posture. There is an impression of readiness and the twist in the hindwing lends a sense of movement. In fact, the shutter has caught the instant just before take off.
A male Broad-Bodied Chaser – the body shape distinguishes them from all other dragonflies so I can be sure about the species – Libellula depressa.
Another female Orange Drop Wing – as ever, it is the males of the species that have all the colour!
A photo of another female probably The Scarlet Dragonfly -Crocothemis erythraea. This time the image is from 10 stacked photos. There is a crop of this photo on the first of the Macro pages (The Gallery).
Western Demoiselle fly – Calopteryx xanthostoma. A large metallic damselfly with fluttering, butterfly-like wings. The male has a metallic blue body with broad dark blue-black spots across the outer parts of its wings while the female has a metallic green body with translucent pale green wings. More common on the river Aveyron than by the still waters of the lakes.

Here are a few pictures from the 2nd outing. It was a little disappointing in terms of the number of species I was able to spot but the lakes looked magical when i first arrived. They were cloaked in a thick mist which soon lifted but for a while left all the spiders webs at the edge of the lake coated in dew drops.

The lakes seem to be home to huge numbers of spiders! They are probably drawn there by the abundance of food on offer. Most of the larger webs contained several prey items that the spiders seemed to be keeping for a late lunch. They certainly weren’t going hungry!
Since there were plenty of them, I concentrated on the small blue damselflies of which there were many. Damsel flies are not very easy to identify but I think this one has the sort of name you might expect – the Common Bluetail – Ischnura elegans? Next time I’ll spend more time on identification! Below are a couple of close-ups – not sure of the species.

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