One greenbottle is more than enough

click photo to enlarge
Some of the world's worst songs are not the output of say, the Spice Girls, Abba, or Justin Bieber* but are those that we teach to young children. The effect on me of songs such as "Michael Row the Boat Ashore", "Kumbaya", "Five Little Speckled Frogs" and "Ten Green Bottles" has been so profound that hearing one of these ditties today re-kindles in me thoughts of preceptorcide**. I know that many children enjoy the repetition, jollity, generally upbeat mood, or even the sentimentality of these songs. The trouble is that, as a foundation on which to build a deeper appreciation of music, they are jerry-built constructions, and may well account for some of the debased preferences of the music-buying public as evinced by what passes for the Top Forty today.

My annual sighting of a greenbottle fly triggered the words of the irritating song about ten green glass bottles mentioned above and the subsequent reflection on children's songs. As usual, I came across the colourful creature as I did a late summer tour of the garden in search of an image or two of the perennials that are now in full flower. When I first became acquainted with this fly I discovered that it has an unwholesome lifestyle and habits very much at odds with its incandescent appearance. Consequently I found it entirely appropriate that its name reminds me of one of the world's worst songs.

* On second thoughts the output of these"artistes" are among the world's worst songs.
** Preceptorcide: a word invented by me for this blog post. Work it out.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/160 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Damsels and dragons

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I'm naturally curious about the things that I photograph. Consequently I often find myself learning something about areas in which I am fairly ignorant, and into which, without the prompt of photography, I would hardly ever venture. Today's images are a case in point. I have no more interest in insects than the average layman, but these two were presenting themselves very conveniently and so I took a couple of shots. Here's something of what I learned when I decided to find out precisely what they were. The information comes from the very helpful British Dragonfly Society website.

Damselflies and dragonflies belong to the insect order Odonta. This name means "tooth jawed" after their serrated mouthparts. Odonta is subdivided into two sub-orders, Zygoptera (damselflies) and Anisoptera (dragonflies), and a number of distinctive features separate the former from the latter. Damselflies are most easily distinguished by their habit of holding their wings along their abdomen when at rest: dragonflies hold them out, often at right angles to their body. The more sharp-eyed observer can also note that the wings of the damselfly are almost equal in size and shape whereas the dragonfly has forewings that are obviously larger. Finally, the eyes of the damselfly are always separated: those of the dragonfly always touch even if only at a single point. Armed with that information it was clear that my two subjects were damselflies. In fact I knew that of the larger winged insect before my research began, though that was probably the sum of my knowledge of that sub-order.

The other information I sought was in connection with the name. Why dragonfly?  It seems that they used to be called "horse stingers" from the, probably mistaken, belief that they bit horses making them start. In fact it was probably the flies that were the dragonflies' prey that caused alarm in the horses, and the nearby presence of the larger insects led them to be blamed. Damselflies were sometimes called "Devil's Darning Needles" from the belief that if you fell asleep by a stream on a warm summer's day they would use their slender bodies to sew your eyelids closed! As to the origin of the "dragon" part of the name, I anticipated some piece of folklore involving a fair damsel and a wicked dragon, but alas, I could find nothing.

I have neither the lens nor the inclination to pursue insects as a regular photographic subject, so for these shots I used the Zuiko 40-150mm at its maximum extension and then cropped the images slightly.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Photo 1 (Photo 2)
Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mmmm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/500 (1/160)
ISO: 200 (100)
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Country music, photographic genres and hoverflies

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Q. What happens when you play country music backwards?
A. You sober up, your wife comes home and your dog comes back to life.
Anon.

As far as music goes I like to think I've got an open mind. I enjoy rock, blues, folk, jazz and classical. Even a well-constructed pop song will attract my attention. But I do struggle with British brass band music, even though I have a Percy Grainger CD with his music played in this way, which I enjoy very much. I'm also not a big fan of country and western, partly for the reasons alluded to in the joke above, but also because it seems like the pulp fiction end of the musical spectrum. That said, there are a few individual songs by the likes of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash that I quite like. And, when it comes to song titles, country and western has the appealing ability of being able to mock itself. Many people will have heard If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body, Would You Hold It Against Me, but how about She Used My Tears To Wash Her Socks, or I Gave Her A Ring, She Gave Me The Finger. And what about the slightly surreal If The Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me?

As far as photography goes I am, broadly speaking, a generalist: I like to try my hand at most genres, though I favour landscape, architecture, semi-abstract, still-life, flora, black and white and candid. However, as with music, there are a few specialisms that don't interest me. My indifference to motorsports photography is probably linked to my disdain for fast cars. "Street photography" is something that leaves me cold: many practitioners seem to engage in indiscriminate machine-gunning with the camera in the hope of producing something of the quality of Henri Cartier-Bresson. That's not to say that candid photography of deliberately chosen people, situations and compositions doesn't appeal to me - it does - but street photography as it seems to be practised appears to be so much less than that. It's a genre that I associate with the rise of digital, though it must have existed in the days of film. The same seems to be true of insect photography. If you visit the forums you can hear people almost salivating at the onset of spring when the "bugs" start to appear and they can mount their macro lenses and hunt out the little blighters. This is another type of photography that holds no particular fascination for me.

However, that's not to say that if an obliging hoverfly comes my way when I'm photographing Heliopsis flowers that I won't take his (or her) picture. I will. And I did! As you can see above.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/1250
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On