Dragonfly in flight

[Dave Humphries]

I shot this today, I'm quite chuffed at my luck.

It was quite inquisitive and kept "buzzing" me, after a while of trying to follow it around and focus 'on-the-go', I gave that up and manually focused at identifiable distance and waited until it passed through 'the zone' and let rip with the continuous shoot mode. Only got two frames and in the second, all I got was its tail, but this one was just great. Sadly it disappeared after that, so no chance of a re-shoot.



Note to self for next time; use a better aperture (e.g. f8 or f11), I was really lucky getting this almost sharp at f6.3 at 250mm, at about 6 feet (2m) range. The shutter speed of 1/4000s explains the frozen wings, although it metered wrong and made it 2 stops under, so another bit of luck, at 1/1000s, they wouldn't have been sharp. It wasn't huge, I'd say about 3-4 inch wingspan (100mm).

Little PP (for me);
1) ACR 5.4 Auto, then fine tune exposure, recovery and blacks, open in PSE6
2) Crop from 4282 to 1262 width, so this is full size
3) USM for LCE: 20%, 45px, 0t.
4) USM for sharpening: 250%, 0.4px, 1t.
5) Convert to 8 bit and sponge away what I think was a bit of CA around a specular highlight.

Hope the info helps others.
C&C welcome

Cheers,

[Jim B.]

Nice one ,Dave!

[batman44]

Very cool!!!

[Alis]

Very nice, Dave. I like the angle too, you can see a lot of body parts.

[Peter Ryan]

Thinking on your feet. Great shot.

Peter

[Keith]

Nice shot Dave, plenty of detail.

[Wirefox]

Dave an amazing shot. I bet you can rub your tummy and pat your head at the same time too. I suspect my hand/eye coordination would render this shot impossible for me these days

Steve

[Dave Humphries]

Jim, Kori, Alis, Peter, Keith and Steve,

My thanks for the kind words, but this really was more luck than judgement!
Granted it is exactly what I was aiming/hoping for, but the chances of it coming right in one of two shots were astronomical.

What you don't see is that there was a tall bit of reed just out of frame below the beastie, which I had focused on, so I just waited for it to over fly that and pressed the button, I don't think I was even looking through the viewfinder, I knew where the framing was (above the reed) and snapped when it was in the right place. I got lucky it was in the very narrow DoF on the first click.

Steve, I wouldn't have believed it, but actually you're right, I can - I just tried it (imagine that! )

BTW, I like how their "under-carriage" folds up so well !
It's odd, I hate moths, wasps, bees and spiders, but birds, butterflies and dragon/damsel flies don't faze me, even if they 'bump' into me. The other's have me ducking and diving for cover How silly is that?

Thanks to one and all,

[batman44]

Luck or not... It's a great shot!
I know what you mean about certain bugs that just make you want to run! But when I see some of these - I have no problem trying to take a picture of them....including a banana spider I had to shoot for my son last year! He loves that stuff....and what parents do for their kids!
It is very cool looking...if I do say so, but I was pretty far away and needed to do some sharpening afterwards! I was happy to see it did not return this year!

[ajith.rajeswari]

Still thinking how you shot this

[Dave Humphries]

Would you like me to eloborate?

I thought I had the salient points covered already, but may be I've said something that has caused confusion(?)

Happy to help if I can,

[cneedha]

Incoming!! Makes me want to take cover.

[Colin Southern]

My thanks for the kind words, but this really was more luck than judgement!

I have a theory that the more we think about the potential issues involved, and how to counter them, the more we "make our own" luck

[Lincs1]

Outstanding - surely someone has a remote control to make it hover for you just like that.

Take cover

Lincs1