Dragons for Tiny Tuesday

Tiny Tuesday: Dragon against a green background 


There's lots of green stuff getting in the way of today's shots for Tiny Tuesday, as you can see.

I awoke earlier than usual this morning, so after grabbing some breakfast and a quick shower I headed on down to the local water meadows to see if I could track down any dragons.  I know some people can manage without eating breakfast but I definitely cannot, and become very grouchy without food.  

The main is a female black tailed skimmer.  While quite a common dragonfly she's not one that I have seen before so I was rather pleased to spot her.  She was a bit flighty and kept trying to hide quite low down amongst the long grasses.  I ended up having to kneel down and take this shot through a slight gap in the grasses which gives the shot a soft outer edge and slightly softens the right wing group in places.

Having said that, I really am quite pleased with the photograph and so I've gone for it as the main.  The extra is of a female broad bodied chaser that I managed to get on the wing.  Again, I'm having to shoot through the grasses and reeds so was quite pleased to be able to acquire focus so successfully.  I'm less pleased about the shutter speed - the shot was taken at 1/500th of a second with an f8 aperture.  I could have done with having a shutter speed three times that really in order to freeze the wings which are too blurred really.