I love trying to capture images of dragonflies in flight, which requires a combination of skill and luck and a whole lot of patience. There were several Common Baskettail dragonflies (Epitheca cynosura) patrolling the waters of a small pond in Orkney Springs this past weekend and I managed to capture several shots of them in flight.
Common Baskettails spend most of the time flying and they rarely perch, so I tried to track them through the viewfinder of my camera. They are so small that the auto focus of my camera can’t seem to capture them, so I resorted to manual focusing most of the time. Fortunately they occasionally hover momentarily, which gives me a somewhat better chance of focusing on them.
The first photo below is probably the sharpest image that I captured. I like it a lot, but the background seems a little too neutral, almost like a studio shot. The second photo does a better job in showing some the ripples and color variations of the waters of the pond. The dragonfly in the final photo was much farther away, but I really like the sense of place that it gives you. It makes me think of a passenger jet flying at a high altitude above the land below.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Leave a comment