Photo Shoot With A Red Dragonfly. (Photo Essay)

Capture This is having the theme BUGS this week. Since I tend to take several (usually 20+) shots of bugs I tend to have a collection of them. This is from last summer, many of these shots have not been posted to Gather before.

There aren't too many bugs here yet, so I'm digging into my archives while I try to shoot some new buggy shots. :)

While at Bluffview, a favored place to sit and relax, I saw these little red dragonflies flitting around at the water's edge. I carefully snuck up to see if I could capture some macros of them. Amazingly I did... and plenty of them!

As with the grasshopper I started off timid not sure how the dragonfly would react to my stalking it with a camera lens.



At this point it flew off. Darn it! I thought.

... Then it came back. Not on the same plant, but close to it.


There were a few of these guys around. I'm unsure if these shots are all one dragonfly or a few different ones.

The funny thing about dragonflies? They are nature's boomerangs. You scare them off and they come right back to you, LOL. Okay, okay, they don't come back to the same spot, but within a few inches of it.


Once I noted they were boomerangs I got REAL brave. Let's see that dragonfly face. Say Cheese!


I wonder what I looked like in it's dragonfly vision? LOL

Then I noted how beautifully the wings shimmered in the sunlight. Keeping in mind I'm shooting with a 5mp point and shoot camera, I tried my luck, sure that I could not capture that amount of detail.

Almost...


Yes! There's that shimmer!


How about one more photo?


How beautiful those wings were shimmering in the sunlight.

I plan to go back to Bluffview this summer to see if I can repeat this shoot with the new camera.

All photos are taken with my HP Photosmart M425 camera. It's a 5mp camera. NO editing has been done to these shots other than cropping to show details.