Dragonfly

Here's one that has been flying around the hard drive for a good little while now, and I have one friend who will be happy to see it here on the blog.  In all honesty, I hope that there will be another few people out there happy to see it as well.  This is a dragonfly that spent a good two days flying around my head while on vacation with My Lovely Assistant a few years ago.  Every day it would come out and sit on a branch or a deck chair and just tease me.  Sitting long enough for me to pull out my camera and then fly away as soon as I was ready to shoot.  Finally, on the final day, it landed on this little branch and waited.  I already had a telephoto lens on my camera as I was also stalking a heron (photographs at this link) so I slowly held the camera up and this time the dragonfly decided to stick around.  I shot this photograph at f5.6, 1/400sec, ISO 400 at 300mm.  I wanted to make sure that the dragonfly itself would be very much in focus, but I also wanted to make sure that I had a nice blurred background.  I also upped the exposure a little bit in Photoshop in order to bring out a little bit more of the dragonfly and to really get the details in the wings.  That came at the expense of the bottom of the branch being a little but over-exposed, but I feel that it worth doing as the dragonfly is far more interesting to look at than the branch is.