photoartflightBlue Dasher Wing Detail
Closeup detail of a Blue Dasher Dragonfly Wing. This dragonfly is only about an inch and a half long. Hard to get closeup wing detail with a normal macro lens, especially without disturbing your subject or if there is a distance of water between you and your subject. From commercial work I have a wide assortment of macro lenses to chose from, but for dragonflies my favorite setup is a hybrid setup of telephoto lens, extension tube, 1.4X teleconverter and another extension tube. I also use fill flash with a Better Beamer flash extender. If you use this combination it is manual focus and exposure is determined from your histogram as you are pushing the auto exposure and auto focus. By using 2 extension tubes on each end of the teleconverter you are actually enlarging the image on the sensor. With trial and error you soon become used to using this combination and exposures become consistent. But you can get closeups of subjects that are usually out of reach. Also handy to do a 3 or 5 shot panorama or a stacked multi-shot image of a small subject.
5 shot panorama
Extreme setup with 2 1.4X teleconverters with extension tubes, showing placement of tubes & teleconverters. Usually I use only one extension tube. So to start use only the first one between the extension tubes and get used exposure and focusing.
photoartflight 