Summer officially starts today and if you are like many people, your summer plans may include a trip to the beach. I tend to associate dragonflies with marshes and ponds, but a few dragonflies also like sandy beaches. It’s not too likely that you will encounter them at an ocean beach, but if you spread out your towel at the sandy edge of a stream, perhaps you might see a Common Sanddragon (Progomphus obscurus).
Common Sanddragons like to perch flat on the sand and transform themselves from water-dwelling nymphs to dragonflies in the open on the sand, rather than attaching themselves to vegetation as do many other dragonfly species. (If you want to see that amazing metamorphosis documented in a series of photos, check out this blog posting, Metamorphosis of a dragonfly, from two years ago.)
I have begun to recognize the kind of habitat that Common Sanddragons prefer and spotted my first one of the year last weekend on the banks of a small stream in Northern Virginia that I was exploring. That dragonfly is featured in the first two photos below. The very next day, I spotted some more Common Sanddragons at a stream in a local park where I had seen them in previous years. The third photo, which gives you a good view of the body of a Common Sanddragon, is from the second day.
This little series of shots illustrates one of the basic dilemmas that I face when photographing dragonflies. Should I try to capture a bit of the personality of this little creatures, which usually means direct eye contact, or should I try to give the clearest possible view of the entire body of the dragonfly, which usually means a side view? Fortunately, I am sometimes able to get both types of shots, but I am instinctively drawn more to shots like the second one below than to ones like the third image.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
This was all new information for me. I never would have thought to look for dragonflies in sandy areas. We certainly have plenty of sandy soil and sand-edged streams. I’ll have to look more closely.
Nice Mike! It is always a challenge to get a good angle for Dragonflies. Sometimes you just have to shoot what you can get. I usually like to shoot a series of images at different focus points and blend them for overall increase in sharpness but keeping the background softer, but most of the time they do not co-operate.
It’s hard to find cooperative dragonflies. Some are super skittish and fly away at the slightest motion, while others will hold there perches for a good long time or will return to them after flying away. As you have probably noted from my shots, we have a pretty good number of species in Northern Virginia and I enjoy finding new ones.