Watching insects is sometimes like watching a Cirque du Soleil production, very colorful and incredibly acrobatic, like these mating damselflies that I photographed recently at Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in Vienna, VA.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
A smile to my face so early this morning. Perfectly described! So lovely too! 🙂
Quite the dramatic background for those shots, too. Nice.
Thanks, Joe. I suspected that someone would comment on the background. It looks like I used flash, but instead I happened to be using spot metering mode and must have been taking the reading off of the brightly illuminated damselfly . The water in the background ended up significantly underexposed, which gave a cool effect.
Beautiful! I watched the wind blow a dragonfly back and forth while it hung on to a twig, much like a flag would.
One of my favorite dragonflies is the Halloween Pennant, because of the way that it blows in the breeze, just as you described.
I think the one I saw was a calico pennant. The name “pennant” didn’t click until just now. It must reflect how they blow back and forth in the wind like a pennant.
Very clever connection between man and nature!
Good thought for your title–a circus minimus. Love the first shot!
Hi Mike-your photos are beautiful, but the damsels are not mating…yet-they are in tandem….jinni foster
That’s interesting. Damselflies are so small that it’s hard for me to tell what they are doing.