Two weeks ago, during the waning days of summer, I captured this image of a beautiful Needham’s Skimmer dragonfly (Libellula needhami) at Huntley Meadows Park, the local marshland where I do a lot of my shooting. The vivid red of its body made it really stand out—camouflage did not seem to be a viable option.
Although this dragonfly species is pretty common, I only saw a couple of them this season and this was the only one that I managed to photograph. The dragonfly was perched on a dried stalk in a field and it was tough to try to get any kind of clear background, particularly because I did not want to move too much and risk scaring away the dragonfly.
In these two images, you can see two slightly different approaches that I used. In the first one, I was not worried that there were some horizontal stalks in the background. In fact, I actually like the repetition of the horizontal line and don’t find them distracting, given how blurred they are. In the second image, I tried to get as uncluttered a background as I could, which isolates the dragonfly a little better. I tend to like the first image a little more, but I welcome any thoughts about which image you prefer.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
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Mike Powell 