When I am capturing wildlife images, I am usually driven by multiple motivations that sometimes come in conflict with each other. On the one hand, I am trying to capture reality, to record the presence of a given subject in a way that makes it recognizable and identifiable. On the other hand, I am trying to create art, by choosing compositional elements and camera settings that make an image that is visually pleasing to me.
At this time of the year, dragonflies become one of my favorite subjects and I eagerly await the emergence of new species as we move deeper into spring and eventually into summer. This past Monday at Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, I noted that Spangled Skimmer dragonflies (Libellula cyanea) are now with us. This species is pretty easy to identify because it is the only local species that has black and white stigmas—stigmas are the narrow rectangular patches of color that can be found on the front edges of the wings.
In the first image, a male Spangled Skimmer was pretty cooperative and let me capture one of my favorite type of dragonfly images—a head-on shot. In this kind of shot, the dragonfly’s body is almost always out of focus, but I am ok with that, because it forces the viewer to focus on the dragonfly’s amazing eyes.
The dragonfly in the second shot, which is an immature male Spangled Skimmer, had flown into a tree after I inadvertently spooked it. I loved the way that it was clinging to a branch. Shooting at an upward angle, I tried to simplify the background to draw attention to the branches as well as to the dragonfly. (As is often the case with dragonflies, immature male Spangled Skimmers initially have the coloration of adult females—eventually the dragonfly in the second photo will look like the one in the first image.)
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
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Mike Powell 