White-faced Meadowhawk

What a capture! The depth of field through the wings is excellent. Your imaging skills are quite good!

Dragonflies are really tough to catch and get sharp. The plane of focus has to be perfect, and they have to be still for a second.
Here, the tail and some of the wing is in good focus, but the head and eye - the most important parts - are soft. Looks as if the focus point was on the body instead of the eye.
Still, a pleasing shot with nice colours, good comp, and BG.
Sandy

Looks very good to me, Jim. Great work on capturing and processing this. So was each exposure 2 sec? And then manual focus adjustment between each of the 18 images? If so, wow. A very stationary df and still conditions. I think the detail is quite good and you have a terrific bg and a nice perch and pose. Well done all around.

Fine tight view of the df with gorgeous details. It is interesting that the eye is a touch soft, check your stack to see if there was movement in that frame. I do think that you can "improve the apparent sharpness of the eye by adding some more contrast to just the eye.

Hi,

Thank you for the comments. Scott--each exposure was 2 seconds and the dragonfly repositioned itself for the last few images in this series. I took about 100 images total from different positions and distances. I hold my breath and fire away until the buffer is full. I'll do several passes so that there are (hopefully) no gaps in the series. I may have a better series too. I remember deliberately focusing on the eye several times. While processing, I do remember seeing individual facets of the compound eye so the detail is present. I may have two images in the stack that are offset slightly which can create some fuzziness. Also taking Mark's advice, the contrast is very low in this type of lighting so I may have to bump that up a tad for the head. This dragonfly is also fairly fresh and the eyes are somewhat opaque and are less pigmented than the eyes from older individuals. So I have some work to do and I'll repost within a day or two. .........................Jim