Looking for a landscape....

... and I found this.

I'm no entomologist but I suspect that this is a female Large Red Damselfly (Pyrrhosoma nymphula).

Best viewed Large!

I stopped at the Grand Union Canal where it crosses the A5 near Daventry and went a little walk looking for a landscape shot in the early evening sunlight, when, I saw a flash of a substantial insect fly right past me. It settled and stayed on a leaf for quite some time giving me chance to set to manual focus and get quite a few shots. Having no tripod this was all handheld so I wasn't expecting to get anything wonderful, especially as I was shooting towards the sun and couldn't see diddly-squat on the lcd screen.

I was quite surprised and delighted to get home and find two shots where most of the damselfly was in focus. Unfortunately, neither was 100%, but this is the better of the two with just the end of the body blurred. The problem was it was less than 25% of the frame.

A bit of work to increase the size of the cropped image, sharpen and reduce the noise and quite a nice, but not perfect shot.

A productive end to the day and a contrast to where we'd been invited to discuss real issues that we have that prevent us from feeling we are an organisation that it is great to work for. Open season was declared..... Not in any kind of negative sense but an honest assessment of the problems that are preventing our team to feel that we are working for Virgin.

In the end, what we said was entirely endorsed by similar comments and issues made in the management team meeting yesterday. Phew!

Still, a large number of issues to be recognised let alone solved, but the first step has been taken.