Dragonflies and Damselflies

I have been waiting for dragonflies to emerge as the cold weather has delayed them. After a decent warm day, I saw my first - a Teneral (newly emerged) Common Blue Damselfly (R5/500mm). It was well-camouflaged but fortunately I had seen it land.

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Alan, you think you have it cool. We had frost that seems to have delayed/killed the batch of mosquitoes, so no dragons in sight here either. Seems you're managing well with the R5! :) I'm still fumbling with scenarios and settings.

Jack
KISS, Jack - keep it simple stupid is my MO. I am using basic settings, nearly always in Fv in full manual and I change the iso to get the exposure in the full knowledge you can under-expose and correct in RAW.
 
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I’ve had my R5,for a few months now, but due to the stay-at-home order, I haven’t been able to really test it. I took this in my backyard, is this a Broad-Bordered Bee Hawk-Moth?​

I should have posted this in

Butterflies, Moths and Assorted Insects...​

 

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The Dragonfly season has really started. A 4-spotted chaser taken at 1000mm with the R5 and 100-500mm + 2xTC.

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The Dragonfly season has really started. A 4-spotted chaser taken at 1000mm with the R5 and 100-500mm + 2xTC.
Great shots Alan.
I can report, here on the continent, too. Yesterday I got my first dragonfly for this year.
Must be a very young female darter. They change from yellow to brown within a few days.

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It's being able to go out with a single lens that can be used to photo birds 30-50m away at one minute and then dragonflies and butterflies at 2-5 m the next that has swung me over to having the 100-500mm (without or with TCs) rather than the RF 800mm with its 6m mfd for my particular needs though I still have GAS for that lens. At 1000mm and 3.3m away, you can see how this one needs a shave - any closer you tend to scare them off.


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Something you don't catch sight of too often:
A just molted female darter with the shell of the nymph just beside it.
Twas quite difficult to get both on one pic. So some kind of compromise in resolution.
The forewings seemed to be glued together and I didn't have the time to wait, if they could separate. I hope they could.

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A rare dragonfly - a female Scarce Chaser. Taken at only 2.8m with 1000mm on the R5. It even shows the individual lenses in the compound eye (at 2.4m).

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