Dragonflies

While the boys were playing in the yard this afternoon, I was cruising around looking at how my dahlia’s were growing. As I meandered through the garden, I noticed a dragonfly on top of one of the stakes. And then saw a second one.

I ran back to the house to grab my camera and was lucky they were still there when I got back. I had on my 24-70 lens, which was not the right choice for what would be almost a macro photo (again … time for a new lens! haha). The dragonflies let me get pretty close to them and I had some issues with focus in my set up – the dragonfly was small, the background didn’t contrast enough and the lens would get fooled. I needed to experiment more with my aperture to get a better depth of field – I had to throw away a lot of images because the dragonfly’s face was out of focus, but just beyond its head was tack sharp. Again – needed a macro lens because I was fighting my lens focal distance, basically not being able to zoom up to where I wanted to fill the screen. So these are all decent crops – I got a few good ones. I never realized how … alien … dragonflies are. Especially the second photo in – their back and wing system look almost translucent!