Spray'n'pray

This morning R and I set to and reclaimed the secret garden, which over the spring and summer had become so overgrown that the inaccessible garden would have been a better nickname for it. I wasn't sure how far we'd be able to get today but by lunch time, to my surprise, it was looking as tidy as is compatible with my principle of prioritising wildlife habitat. At any rate it looks more like garden than jungle, and I think that the Boy Wonder, who's been quite disapproving of it on his last few visits, will be rather happier the next time he comes to see us. 

Once we'd finished work, R went to put the oven on for lunch, while I noodled around looking for invertebrates to photograph. It wasn't a great day for either inverts or macro photography, being noticeably cold and windy, so when I found yet another pair of loved-up Tiger Hoverflies on the pond sedge in the wild garden I had to adopt a high speed spray'n'pray technique: thumb jammed on the centre focus point button and forefinger on the shutter. After about fifty frames I checked my shots and found approximately none to be acceptable, so I did it again while holding the far end of the sedge leaf with the other hand, to stop the whole thing whipping back and forth in the breeze. Another fifty or so frames got me two keepers, which in these circumstances was a pretty reasonable success rate.

R: C5, D11.