When I was first getting serious about my photography, I remember being told how important it was to isolate my subject in order to prompt the viewer to focus on what I thought was important. At this time of the year I take a lot of photos of insects and it is often a real challenge to isolate them from their backgrounds. As I was going through some images from this past weekend, I noted that I tried a couple of different approaches when photographing male Widow Skimmer dragonflies (Libellula luctuosa) at Jackson Miles Abbott Wetlands Refuge.
In one case, I tried to isolate the dragonfly by shooting at an upwards angle, thereby eliminating the clutter of the vegetation. Of course, it helped that the dragonfly cooperated by perching at the tip of the stem. I really like the way that the colors and shapes of the background almost match those of the dragonfly.
In a second case, the dragonfly was perched in the midst of the vegetation. I moved to a position so that my camera’s sensor was on a parallel plane to the dragonfly’s open wings and opened the aperture pretty wide. Normally I try to keep the aperture stopped down in an effort to get more parts of the dragonfly in focus. This time, however, the dragonfly was relatively flat and I was able to throw the background a bit out of focus without losing the details of the dragonfly. The contrast of the background colors with those of the dragonfly helps it to stand out, while retaining a sense of the environmental setting.
There are lots of other ways to isolate subjects. Sometimes we have the luxury of being able to think about them, but often we are forced to make rapid decisions about shooting angles and camera settings that will have a huge impact on our final images.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
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