5 Essential Techniques for Dragonflies Photography

Dragonfly is one of the most beautiful , agile and fast flying insects which has been photographs since decades because of its bright colors and structural patterns.  Photographing dragonfly is one the difficult and challenging task I personally experienced but when I passed through some challenges I get the most beautiful and amazing photographs .

Here is Top Five Tips from my personal experience

Study your subject

Before start studying the dragonflies let me tell you that photographing dragonflies need patience to photograph because they get scared easily and move from place to place in seconds.  They are more active in bright sunlight as they need the heat from the sun to warm their wings enough to fly, so in a sunny day its hard to get than photograph. The best time in my opinion is, when the sunlight(early morning or sun sitting) is low when they cannot move actively give us enough time to correctly expose than and secondly this low light is perfect for photographing.

Composing your subject:

Like every macro photographs the sharpness of photographs is key.  dragonfly photographs needs to be capture with background blur by focus your subject and let the background blur. Aperture will ensure to get sharp photographs by creating depth of field.

The movement of dragonfly is unpredictable so we need to have high shutter speed by keeping the aperture to create perfect sharp photographs.

Correctly exposing the subject:

 Getting the right exposure value for photographing dragonfly is difficult to achieve. They moves really fast and gives us a very little time to correctly expose it. Obviously faster shutter speed will be recommended for photographing dragonfly. A tripod will be useful but you can photographed it  hand-holding the camera, make sure you keep a steady hand, maintain a good footing, and ensure image stabilization or vibration reduction function of lens is switched on.

The sharpness of an image is completely depends of aperture. If your aperture value is not correct according to your image than your image will not pop out but rather go to the dust bin and if your aperture value is perfect according to your image than its will pop out in your photographic gallery. So as in macro photography low aperture value is key because its blur your background and gives us a complete focus of subject. As shown in the image below

The dragonfly photographs will looks stunning by using the depth of field.

The dragonfly is on the moves all day. They flirt from place to place in seconds with out any stops. Before photographing, spend some time to judge their behavior. As they are unstoppable and some unable to photographs. So spending some time, looking for their behaviors will makes us able to photographs them correctly.

Conclusions:

These are the top five tips that I observed while photographing dragonflies. This is one the difficult photographing subject I had ever done before.