This morning's arrival

We've had builders and decorators in the house of and on for the last few days, which has meant that my opportunities for an early start at the Somerset Levels has been rather curtailed. So with the weather due to be fine this morning I set the alarm for 5am last night.  But when it went off, I have to admit I just couldn't bring myself to get out of bed and I had a lazy lie-in instead.  

So today's blip was taken just outside the backdoor, and its another common darter newly emerged, on an iris leaf in the pond.  You can see its larval case just below it, on the far side of the leaf.

I did consider trying to stack the image from a sequence of shots but there was a little bit of a breeze and the dragon's wings were moving in consequence.  So I opted for a single shot and the f13 just about copes with depth of field required for wing tip to wing tip (barely).  

The insect is beautiful but in a perfect world I would have liked it to pick a better looking leaf as its background ;-). I suppose I could run around the pond and cut down all the ugly looking leaves in an aesthetic cull, but I'm not sure that there would be many left afterwards, so perhaps best not.