Ladybird

I pruned our Fragola grape vine this morning, and brought in about 2kg of (over)ripe grapes to be boiled up for grape jelly. I had sorted them into edible and not, and was washing the usable ones in a colander, when I spotted a 7-spot ladybird in among them. It was somewhat damp, and though it was trying hard to extricate itself it wasn't making much progress on the wet, slippery grape skins.

A nice person would have helped it out of the colander immediately, but naturally I photographed it first.

The light was really bad today, so I had to use a high ISO, a wider aperture than I like for macro work, and a pretty low shutter speed - so it's not surprising that most of the shots were both grainy and blurred. But a few came out reasonably well, and I like this one partly because it shows a flexibility in the waist that I didn't know ladybirds had, and partly because one of the antennae is curled like Hercule Poirot's moustache.

There is still time to upload your macro and close-up shots for this week's Tiny Tuesday; the tags are tinytuesday, tinytuesday26 and tt26. I'm looking forward to my last week of judging the entries - though having said that I still have no idea who is going to be taking over from me next week, so if you know that it's supposed to be you, please can you say something and put me out of my suspense!