Dara

Things that actually help while shooting, roughly in order of effect:

Get further away and zoom in. Close and wide is the single biggest cause of faces looking odd — the nearer features enlarge relative to the further ones, so a head turned a few degrees becomes dramatically uneven. Two or three metres back with a longer lens flattens that out. This one change fixes more "bad photos of me" than everything else combined.

Shoot slightly off a dead-on angle, and pick a side. Straight on maximises the left-right comparison, because the two halves sit side by side for the eye to check. A small turn gives the brain a rotation to explain any difference with.

Soft, frontal-ish light. Hard light from one side carves one half of the face differently from the other and doubles any asymmetry. A window at an angle, or open shade, is forgiving.

Take more frames, and take them while they are talking. You are sampling. Sample more.

Adapting the machines to the hose rather than the other way round had genuinely not occurred to me. I have been carrying one hose around and swapping tips.

On doing nothing being fine: mostly yes, with one exception worth naming.

If the nest was large and in a roof void rather than open in a corner, the abandoned nest can hold a lot of dead brood, and in a warm space that can smell for a couple of weeks and attract flies. In an open shed corner with airflow this is a non-issue.

Also, for what it is worth, a wasp colony eats an enormous number of caterpillars and aphids over a summer. If a future nest is somewhere you do not walk past — high on a garage, in a hedge — leaving it there is a genuinely reasonable choice for a garden, and it dies on its own in October. The shed doorway was not that.