Dragonfly flight

I noticed on yesterday’s safari that the dragonflies were performing hovering in a cloud formation. I have been waiting for this for the last six weeks. It seems that they will only perform these manoeuvres in sunny and still conditions. Photographing this event is going to be an on-going study, as I work towards gathering evidence to prove a dragon flight hypothesis that I arrived at a few months ago.

The shot that I am after, is with the wings at their lowest attitude in the hover cycle. Unfortunately, this event only happens on average once every two seconds. The part of the deep stroke that I want is about 1/20th of the cycle and the dragon beats its wings at around 40 times per second. Doing the maths, this means that I will only get the shot once in 1,600 clicks of the shutter. Like I said, an on-going project.

Also, I will need to freeze the wing motion to about 1/100th of the cycle, which means a shutter speed of 1/4000th second. The image will not have to be perfect. Grossly under exposed will still serve the purpose, even perfect focus will not be essential, as long as there is enough focus to see the wing shape.

Obviously high ISO numbers will be the order of the day, in order to get the shutter speeds. This of course means heavy grain, especially with the severe crop that the image is going to require. With this in mind, I did some research yesterday on noise reduction systems. The favourite seemed to be Topaz, a Photoshop plug-in. So I downloaded it for a trial run.

Topaz results – all I can say is ‘astonishing’! You can see the image and EXIF data above.

I took 50 shots today. Didn’t get what I wanted, but at least from this image a positive identification can be made:

Identification – pantala flavescens, exactly as I suspected, but had no proof.

Dave