If travelling along the A368 Bath to Weston Super Mare road and you decide to stop at Herriot's Pool on the southern tip of Chew Valley Lake, you may notice an information board by the Avon Wildlife Trust. On that board is a photo of a common darter dragonfly taken about four years ago by yours truly. I was asked for this particular photo earlier this year by the AWT head of reserves so I sent it, but also sent another that I took with my DSLR that I thought was better. Technically better it may have been but the original was still preferred, and chosen for the information board. Jack Harrison will no doubt be pleased to know that it was taken by a Fuji S602 bridge camera, i.e. a compact and not a DSLR. Of course the main reason for that was the cost of a DSLR camera which at the time was prohibitive.
Checking the original image I notice that I used iso200 and 1/200 second exposure. Noise is there in small amounts but it's not objectionable and shows how good Fuji's Super CCD system was. Due to the layout of the photosites the camera's 3 megapixels were up-res'd to 6mp. There was no image stabilisation, only just becoming available in the bridge camera market, but the photo is quite sharp, although the image is noticeably backfocussed.
This is the picture.
