photoartflightDistant Dragonfly Closeups
A closeup uncropped image of a Female Blue Dasher Dragonfly. It was in a small pond but off in the distance in the middle of the pond. It was about 8 feet from the edge of the pond. To get this close to Dragonflies that I can not get close to I have come up with a method to get detail images of them. I was using a 400mm f/4 DO lens with multiple stacked extension tubes between multiple teleconverters. With this setup I had to use an on-camera flash with a “Better Beamer” Flash Extender to light the dragonfly because of all the light loss with multiple extension tubes & teleconverters . This dragonfly was about 8 ft out in the water. You can see the flash hotspot on the eye. Changing the order of the extension tubes and different sizes of the teleconverters gives you different zones of manual focus. Also you have to try different exposures because Auto Exposure does not work with all the extension tubes & teleconverters. After trying this for a while you can get nice closeups of distant Dragonflies. Also you usually get nice “clean” & smooth backgrounds. It takes some practice but you can get some interesting images of distant Dragonflies.
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Wow! That first shot is AMAZING, Reed!
Thanks so much Eliza! They are fun photo subjects!
I agree! These are great!
Thanks Mark! They are fun to photograph!!
A hard work gave results, what details you managed to cath with the flash.
Thanks Hans!! It is fun to try different techniques to get the results you want!!
That’s some setup you have there, Reed. Got you some nice closeups.
Thanks Steve! I originally tried this at my old home. We had a fairly large pond on our property and some of the interesting dragonflies stayed off in the distance. So I came up with these techniques to get my closeups of them instead of wading into the pond.
These are wonderful, Reed!
Thanks so much Belinda! They are fun photo subjects!
I never thought of stacking teleconverters and lenses – really innovative approach!
It actually works quite well once you get used to using this approach. But you have to remember with the stacked teleconverters you loose a lot of light going to the sensor so you have to up your ISO quite a bit.
Thanks Sam! It works well, but depending on your camera body you might loose auto focus. But It still comes in handy at times!
Wow!!!
Thanks so much! It helps to get close up images of them!
As a fellow photographer and blogger, I must say that I admire your work. Good job!
Thanks so much Ishan for the kind words! I appreciate them!!