It was too sunny to sit home and finish my comments on Pirsig’s Lila. so I went to Nisqually Wildlife refuge. It must be fall because I saw more birds today than I’ve seen in awhile.
But the high point of the day came while standing at the edge of a swamp trying to capture a shot of this dragon flying. While I’ve managed to get pretty good pictures of one when landed, I’ve never managed to get a picture of one flying before:
In order to capture the shot, I spent nearly a half hour staring through my 400mm lens, trying to manually focus on the dragonfly because autofocus kept trying to focus on the background.
Most of the time I simply stared into the green blur that serves as the background of the above picture. It was a strange meditation, with me and the dragonfly strangely suspended in time.
When I accidentally focused on the bullrushes in the background, it felt strangely surreal as if I’d been transported to a land where blades of grass stand six foot tall:
and even a single pair of blades seem strangely beautiful:
