I took this photo on an Eastern Amberwing dragonfly (Perithemis tenera)) about a week ago when I was shooting at Green Spring Gardens in Alexandria, VA with my good friend and photographic mentor, Cindy Dyer.
Cindy is always encouraging me to upgrade my photograph equipment. For comparison purposes, she put the Nikon D300 that she was using into my hands and had me shoot with it for a few minutes. It was equipped with a Tamron 180mm macro lens that gave it a pretty impressive reach for the dragonflies that we were shooting. It’s interesting that I was able to use my Compact Flash memory card, which was formatted in my Canon, in her Nikon and the Canon photos and the Nikon photos peacefully coexisted in separate folders on the memory card.
I was especially happy that I got a decent shot of the Eastern Amberwing dragonfly. This type of dragonfly is very beautiful, but it’s very small and elusive. BugGuide notes that this dragonfly is normally about 21-24mm long (in case you’ve forgotten, 25.4mm is equal to an inch).
I’m probably going to remain a Canon guy, but I can definitely hear the Siren call of that 180mm macro lens, which comes in a Canon version too.
Eastern Amberwing dragonfly
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Looking at this picture, I can definitely hear that siren as well! I have the same camera as you (Canon 450D / Rebel XSi) and a 60mm macro lens but would love to have the 180mm…. 🙂
Nice picture. Once you’ve done macro it’s hard to not do it.
oh the lust for photography equipment… we all suffer from it!!!