On the motor we went down to do the Damsel flies, we managed to find a couple of specimens but it wasn’t fantastic in terms of numbers, but what we did find, there was nice position but the stem was a little bit boring if you like, nothing much to include in the picture in terms of interest, for this side is we came really close for this first shot, I just faked on one of the eyes of the Damselfly and just got to slide a different fields for picture.
I went down and several weeks later and find the same species out to numerous Damselflies, but this time I inched to find another colorful Devil’s Bit Skaybeas which obviously adds a lot of color to the picture and you can use the flower as an integral part of the shot. Again, shooting on the vertical which very often tends to suit Damselflies and Dragonflies in terms of the format, and stay with the vertical format, this is a Black Daughter, again from the same site which, over the years has proved out productive for a number of different species; and a slightly different view here, again it’s a fairly straightforward perch, but it suits the subject quite well, it’s a very unpleasant picture, a nice clean background and all the attention really is focused on to the Black Daughter itself. Trying to get something a little bit different, obviously early in the morning particularly in the summertime on a still morning, I very often get the Damselflies and the Dragonflies covered in dew which very much out of the new dimension to the picture, a lot of interest going on there; and you can do that in all sorts of way, you can do the very traditional sort of perspective shot just looking down on the back of the Dragonfly’s wings, but here I’ve got a lot tighter with the macro lens of course, fairly shallow depth of field focusing on the eyes and just picking up a little bit of the wings in focus with a lot of the picture actually out of focus, but still it bothers me personally some people perhaps, purists would prefer everything shot, but the quite lot this approach where the differential focus if you like approach where just a small part of the insect is in focus. And then for some incompletely different and silhouette shot here which was taken late in the day, you could do early in the morning at sunrise, of course as well, but this one happens to be taken late in the evening and I purposely shot it against a very clean sky, I was also trying to pick up plenty of color, to this we got that quite low and in the grass and find a specimen which was quite high up on the stem that allows me to shoot and just stay up into the sky. And of course with digital we can also accentuate this sunset fill to the picture quite easily by altering the color balance either in camera or alternatively when you process the image later on in Photoshop.
As you can see everything calls for a few weeks, I’ve managed to get quite a wide variety of images and this is one of the great things that photographing Damselflies and Dragonflies is that they do offer up loads of opportunities for lots of different pictures, different situations and just by working one site you can get a whole range of shots over the course of the summer as different species emerge.
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