It's been a few weeks since my last post. A house renovation project and illness has got in the way of taking pictures for a while. Getting back to it now though
As it's been a while, I took a trip back to an old dependable location, the Basel Botanical Gardens. As I wrote about in a previous post, returning to a place that I know helps to get back into the flow, so I sat in a spot by the pool and watched the damselflies. By doing this I can concentrate on technique without being concerned about any other factors. It's like a reset switch!
It's fascinating to watch the behaviour of damselflies. If you watch for long enough you'll start to see patterns in the flight paths and favourite places to land. Although I'm still trying to get images in flight, once you recognise the landing spots, you can use the time to get the composition set up. You still won't have much time to get the shot, but it's definitely easier than trying to follow the erratic flight of a damselfly with a long lens!
There is a lot more going on, on the surface of a pond than you realise. In a patch of dense pondweed, bees would land for a short moment to take a sip of water, before quickly moving on again.
I managed to catch this one as it was just taking off. I love how the wings blend into the background giving the impression of a wingless bee.
The next image with two beetles was taken with a 300 mm f/4 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter. I'm still surprised at how sharp this lens can be. Considering that these beetles are only a few millimetres in size, the lens has a minimum focus distance of 1.4 metres and its full-frame equivalence is 840 mm.
This is the exception image in this post; the only one taken with a 60 mm macro lens.
Although the following damselfly images were actually taken a few weeks ago, I decided to include them in this post as they fit to the theme.
