Not a lot of words here. Just some pictures and some quick observations on photographing damselflies.
Damselflies are beautiful though when you look at them very close to, they are clearly pretty fearsome hunters. If we look after them and their near-cousins dragonflies, they are clearly equipped to keep down the mosquitoes and midges and that is a significant benefit to us.
I have titled this little post ‘Back to the lakes’. However, in honesty it was the second outing this year. The first was a bit of failure and here are the reasons. People mostly think of photography requires good light. That is sort of true but you will find that most macro-photographers often make use of a flash. My first outing failed because the sun was up and as I think I have said before, photography with a flash results in two images. The first resuls from the daylight that reaches the sensor during the brief (sometimes not so brief – see below) period that the shutter is open. The second results from the light coming from the flash gun. In an ideal world, you can combine the two images with daylight to providing a background and the flash freezing any movement of the subject/camera. In reality this is quite difficult and bright daylight will mean you have two images of the subject that are out of register. You can fight this effect by upping the power of the flash and throttling the daylight by using smaller apertures and low ISOs. If that doesn’t work then if you have enough light from the flash, you can add an ND filter. On my first trip I didn’t juggle these things very well and the vast majority of my exposures were spoiled by daylight. Why? I got up too late and I didn’t check the weather – the sun was up, the creatures were flighty and I mishandled my apertures and everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
On the second outing I was at the lakes early on under a cloudy sun and things went better. Below are some images – not stunning but passable by my standards. I didn’t do any focus stacking… perhaps I should have. However, I really like the challenge of shooting single frames and trying to get acceptable images. Note to self… perhaps I should try using the live ND feature in the OM1 Mk2 to be able to use smaller apertures while still eliminating the problems of the daylight image?
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