Dragonflies and Damselflies

A shot of the head close up. (R5, 500mm, about 1.6m)

View attachment 219613
Impressive detail! My favorite from your last series is the Blue Dasher from the previous page - I love the color of that eyes! It looks like you are using your hiking poles as a monopods (joking off course:) ).
I hope you are getting better with that knee!
 
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This is from the first outing with my R5II, as well as the first time that a dragonfly kept hovering nearby, with the sun in the right position when I had a proper camera with me.


I’m fairly sure this is a migrant hawker, which we call ‘horse biter’ here in the Netherlands. Every stationary one had the telltale spike/Tesla logo.

With no DxO support for the camera, I’ve settled on Lightroom AI denoise, Topaz Photo AI 3.2.0 needed massive adjustments on the sliders for each image and different adjustments at that. When it worked, the results were very impressive, but most of the time you ended up with a posterized oversharpened image.
I don’t want to spend a minute per picture fiddling with denoise sliders. DxO tends to have less impressive results, but the sliders are much more forgiving, so it’s easy to batch up a lot images and use the same settings.
End rant :)
 
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Today I had a very (!!!) cooperative male southern hawker (aeshna cyanea) as subject.
It was hovering so long and so close (< 2m) that I could get those uncropped FF shots of it. :love:
And it did that so often, that several times I could just enjoy watching it without thinking of photos.
Lovely day :cool:. More to come...
R6m2, RF100-500+ext.@700mm, f/16, 1/2000, ISO3200
all photos 6000x4000 downscales to 1500x1000, last one is a 1:1 crop of the first

southern_hawker_2024_01.JPGsouthern_hawker_2024_02.JPGsouthern_hawker_2024_03.JPG
southern_hawker_2024_01_d.JPG
 
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I haven't been out photoing dragonflies, so a Southern Hawker came to visit me and buzzed around our kitchen windows. Not a pretty background. R5ii + RF 200-800mm, focus stack of 7.

Southern_Hawker_Dragonfly_Focus_Stack_800mm-tdns small.jpeg
 
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