Since owning a camera my main go to has always been Bird photography, I really don’t know why the philosophical me makes me think how wonderful it must be to be free as a bird, but the realist in me actually thinks I do actually like my creature comforts especially on cold wet days like what we appear to be having most of the time nowadays. Anyway I’m digressing once more…

I’d arranged to meet Catherine at the local river to do some early morning macro / dragonfly images mainly because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone but also she’d mentioned that she wanted to get some dew shots before the season was over.

We met at the river, Catherine was late as she’d seen a local little owl sat on one of the lamp posts so stopped to take a few images – and she’s the one wanting to take Dragonfly images! As said we met at the river and the grass was suitably dewy, the air was cool and this presented the first issue. Normally when we see dragonfly it is around 10 am or midday and they are buzzing around the local reedbed so relatively easy to spot, in cool cold dewy conditions they are not moving so you spend a hell of a lot of time searching grasses and reeds looking for a static dragonfly, lets just say it took a while to find our first victim a demoiselle. One good thing though is the dragonfly in these conditions don’t move or rather you have got to do a lot of work to make them move.

After a few hundred shots of the first demoiselle we continued up the river, finding the odd dragonfly the going was tough but each new dragonfly found it was a different angle or type of shot to help hone the skills.

Waking further up the bank and away from the main dragonfly reedbeds I was just taking an image of a spiders web and we were discussing moving back down to the reedbeds where we had captured the demoiselle’s when Catherine said “wowser’s look at this”, I turned around to see her pointing at a large old dockleaf and on it’s stem was the Dragonfly from the image. It’s wings were a bit ravaged, it’s dew covered wings glistened as the sun start to come out it was a majestic creature.

The above image is a stacked image of 8 shots, one of my first attempts a focus stacking, still not got the hang of it but I’ll get there.