The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
This male Western Pondhawk was perched in low vegetation at the side of the pond, terrorizing his relatively small feeding territory. Pondhawks are famous for being among the fiercest predators in the world of dragonflies and damselflies.
I made a valiant effort to capture this animal in flight, but none of the frames were of publication quality.
Russel, I find dragonflies difficult to capture in flight. I haven’t got one worthy of posting on here yet. Maybe one day you and I both with succeed. You certainly got him perched well though. The f16 aperture gave you enough DOF to have sharpness throughout the body. The BG is enough out of focus to not be a distraction but lets the viewer see a bit of his environment. It looks like you were working in harsh light but managed it pretty well.
Russ: Nice capture with a good perch. This does look a bit overexposed and if you tone it down the details in the perch show up better and the specular BG highlights are less distracting. I still haven’t pulled the trigger on a sighting device so I’m kind of glad you didn’t get a flight shot. My wallet thanks you. >=))>
@Bill_Fach, I use a free method, which I call the Annie Oakley method. The idea of a dot sight is to give you a wider angle of view so you can find the subject and get it centered enough to be in the FOV of the telephoto lens. But try this – leave both eyes open and your left eye can see the subject with a wider view. “Calibrate” it on a still subject at about the same distance – for me, if my left eye sees the subject at about 10:30 just outside the lens hood, the right eye will see it close to centered. AF will be critical – if the focus point is too far off it will just be a fuzzy blob in the lens but your left eye will still see it. With approximate prefocus you will see it in the viewfinder as well.. Then hit AF and start shooting. With some practice you can then close the left eye and be able to concentrate better on keeping it in the frame, but after a little practice your brain will render both views and you can keep both eyes open while you track it.
But I do find my Olympus Dot Sight invaluable for finding still subjects like this. The big problem is that I need to move from looking through the sight to the viewfinder, which (for me) requires the stability of a tripod. And that move makes it incredibly difficult for birds or bugs in flight.
And the sight needs to be calibrated for subjects at approximately the same distance as you will be using in the field, or parallax will make the crosshairs miss the subject.
Hi, Shirley, Bill, and Diane. What interesting comments! Dragonflies are such speedy and erratic characters that they force us into creative solutions, don’t they?
Where I live in southern Arizona, dragonflies almost never hover. Thus, you have to react instantaneously. You can’t really plan ahead. I use the red dot finder because a dragonfly zooming past me is really difficult to get into the camera’s field of view. I have to pan the camera about as fast as I can twist my body.
Most of the time, the dragonfly ends up out of the field of view or out of focus. But every so often, it actually works. When I do this style of photography for a relatively short period of time, I come home with more than 2,000 frames. That’s when the fun part starts.
With typical photo management software, it’s actually a hopeless task. Fortunately, OM Systems publishes some software which helps you cope with a massive number of frames you’ve collected in burst shooting. When I uncover five or six keepers out of those 2,000 frames, I declare victory.
One thought about the Western Pondhawk. He was photographed in low vegetation, which drives me crazy. With such a complex and pervasive background, it’s really hard to differentiate the translucent wings of a dragonfly in flight from the vegetation in the background. That’s what happened with this creature in flight. I got a number of shots where the body was in focus, but where the wings had essentially disappeared.
