Beautiful creatures Kim
And you've captured them in flight with great skill.
My memory of Dragons on a warm sunny day is of almost incessant movement and unpredictable flightpaths.
So I would appreciate some pointers on
- how you approached the task,
- what you look out for in their behaviour to help make the results more reliable
etc
Colin,
First of all you have to find a place with plenty of dragonflies - often near lakes - and a day with nice sunny weather. Late summer is a good time of the year. Some species are easier than others because they tend to hover a couple of seconds. the Migrant Hawker is a nice species in this respect and it is also relatively big.
The next challenge is to get the dragonfly into focus. Quite ofte the autofocus will hit some distant point on the other side of the lake. Therefore, I normally pre-focus on something in roughly the same distance as I expect the dragonfly to be (a few meters). Then you need a camera with a good autofocus system. I find that the D500 is excellent in this respect (probably also the D5 and D850). For these pictures I used AFC 25 point dynamic ares, but quite often, I use single point.
The shutter speed is important. For these pictures, I used 1/1000s. I tried to go up to 1/4000s, but that was not enough to get the wings sharp. Maybe, I should try with a high-speed flash, but it might end up with less interesting pictures?
