Dragonfly eye damage

Today's hour long session started at 08:30. the sun was out and a breeze was blowing, so I was expecting problems with the harsh light and movement. The session seemed to go quite well with plenty of material: a 7 spot and brown darter butterflies, three types of ladybird, a cricket, wasp moth, bugs, two dragons and two spiders.

Nothing really outstanding to blip and it seemed like the insects just didn't want to be photographed today, but I struggled on and collected 135 images, the most in a single session to date. Certainly plenty enough to find a blip.

The processing session was depressing, three of the subjects not producing usable shots and filling up the trash can. So much material thrown away and what remained was not getting me excited. After more than two hours of processing, I finally viewed the selection folder in slideshow and was relieved to discover that I was being overly pessimistic and there were four perfectly blippable shots amongst the 18 finalists.

I chose this dragon shot which is a repeat from only two days ago, because I wanted to mention the eyes. You can clearly see the brown patches on the upper half of the ocular globes. When I first started blip, I thought these brown patches were part of the dragons patterning, as some dragons have quite complex and colorful patterns on the eyes.

I now realize that these brown patches are sun damage and I strongly suspect that they are blind spots. I suspect this because I have noticed that dragons with chronic damage, turn their heads a lot more when looking for insects. This of course is not proven and could just be coincidence. I did try to research this phenomenon but came up empty. I will be paying more attention to dragon eyes in the future.

I have put a selection of today's shots, plus a couple of mantis shots in folio for anyone interested. Hoping for a better day tomorrow, maybe an earlier start to avoid the breeze.

Dave