As difficult as it is to imagine (at least for me) today is my 65th birthday. That used to be a real milestone, when it was the legal retirement age, and it still carries some weight. You can not believe the number of Medicare Supplement letters I have gotten in the past 6 months! (Unless you have been there yourself.) But no…I don’t feel any different today than I did yesterday, or significantly different than I did a year ago for that matter. In fact, there are parts of me that I begin to suspect do not age at all. Mostly this is a good thing.

For instance I am still learning…though I am beginning to realize that Damselflies may be right at the edge of my attention span. They are not easy to identify, especially from a photo or in the kinds of looks you get in the field…unless you catch them and use a hand-lens. I am probably not going there.

So I think this is a pair of Familiar Bluets mating. Beyond its ID value, I like the image because of the other elements as well: The spiny seed heads, the arch of the reed, and the way the damselflies are framed by the broken reed in the background.

Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1 EV exposure compensation. (You might have noticed that my conventional –1/3EV has advanced to –1EV over the past few weeks. This is largely due to the damselflies, and specifically to the blues on the flies. They are so intense that they burn to white even at –1/3EV.) 1680mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/500th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.