Look At Me!

Though most of the time my problem with taking animal pictures is getting an animal that doesn't want its picture taken to cooperate and stay still long enough for me to aim and focus. But once in a while the opposite problem occurs, where I'm trying to take one picture and something seemingly photobombs the picture. This happened twice a couple weeks ago. Sometimes the photobomb is a momentary inconvenience, but all too often the activity leads to the original subject and the photobomber fleeing from camera range.

In this 1st one, I intended to get a picture of a Cabbage White butterfly on what I believe to be Birdsfoot Trefoil. Although I didn't think the trefoil was particularly popular with the pollinators, at least one butterfly was checking it out when another flew in. In this case the photobomb was probably about romance; the one with 2 dark smudges on the forewings is a female while the intruder with 1 smudge spot on its forewings is a male. (I have no idea if these crazy kids ever got together as a couple.)

June 15, 2022 at Sourland Mountain Preserve

Next, I was attempting to take a picture of a Blue Dasher when a Common Whitetail decided to fly right in front of the BD. Being closer to the camera, the CW was out of focus. If the CW had flown close to the BD, it's possible that I could have gotten an interesting action shot of the 2 of them, though the more likely result would have been a picture with 1 or both dragonflies partly out of the frame. In this case the 2nd dragonfly's photobomb was completely unintentional as he was neither attacking the first dragonfly nor trying to claim its perch.

June 15, 2022 at Sourland Mountain Preserve



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