What’s your most challenging subject as a photographer? Do you chase the perfect lighting for your landscape photos or pursue the decisive moment in your street shots or wait endlessly for an elusive creature to appear?
At least several times a year, I will attempt to photograph dragonflies in flight. Dragonflies are small, fast, and agile. Some of them seem utterly unpredictable and almost impossible to track or fly high in the air, out of range of even long telephoto lenses.
What’s an ideal scenario? In the best of all worlds, I would like to find a dragonfly that flies a repeated route, such as patrolling a portion of a stream, and periodically hovers at my eye level or below.
Yesterday I spotted a dragonfly as I was following a stream in a remote part of my favorite marshland park. The dragonfly would hover for a while and then move a short distance away and hover again.
I was pretty excited as I put my camera to my eye and tried to find the dragonfly in the viewfinder. With my zoom lens extended to 600mm, it’s a little like looking through a straw—there is a pretty limited field of view. I set my focus to manual mode, having learned in the past that it is almost impossible for me to gain and hold focus on small moving subjects in auto mode. One of the challenges of the Tamron 150-600mm lens is that the focus ring is at the back of the lens near the lens mount, which means that it is tough to hold the lens steady and focus manually.
The dragonfly was cooperative and gave me a number of chances before it flew away. When the magical moments ended, I looked at a few of my images on the back of my camera and couldn’t immediately identify the dragonfly. Initially I thought it was a Mocha Emerald, like the one that I seen near that same location earlier in September, but the coloration and body shape was all wrong. Once I got home, I did a little research and figured out that I had photographed a Shadow Darner (Aeshna umbrosa), a call confirmed by local dragonfly expert Walter Sanford.
I am pretty happy with these shots. I know that I was lucky to see this dragonfly, but I also know that the hours and hours that I have spent shooting with this camera and lens helped me to take advantage of the situation. A combination of luck, patience, and a bit of skill—it sounds like a good recipe for handling your most challenging subjects as a photographer.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
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Mike Powell 