Lying in wait..........male Black-tailed Skimmer

Grim looking bugger isn't he

I'm really happy and disappointed at the same time with this image.

The BG was almost on top of the subject so to hang on to the smoothness I opted to shot at f6.3 instead of f11.

I knew I'd have to shoot it as an image stack, and I wanted the final image to have focus fall-off front and back, but more in focus flower frames won't match up properly because they themselves have too little DoF - bummer

You live and learn

I'd be a lot happier if the OoF FG wasn't quite so OoF, and I wish the wings ran a bit more corner-to-corner in the frame - might just try for a re-shoot of this if the rain will hold off.

Comp is full frame editorial - one day I'll get a cover if it kills me!

D2Xs
180mm macro
100ISO
1/13th sec @ f6.3
PP CaptureNX and manually stacked in CS3

Thanks for looking anyway folks

Worthy of that cover Andy

Looks pretty good to me. I don't mind the out of focus foreground as it seems to highlight the crisply focused face of the dragonfly. It's a shame the petal is slightly obscuring the face but there's not a lot you could do about that.
I'm sure that front cover is just around the corner.

that looks good to me Andy, I like the unusual viewpoint. The flowers make a very pleasant foreground even if they are OOF.

It's no mean feat getting close to these, they're right up there with Brown Hawkers in terms of their aversion to photographers Just out of interest was this taken very early in the morning?

Matt

Really different. I like the sharpness of the face and the flowers make it too - oof not an issue for me. Worth a cover I'm sure!

Dave

Nice but I feel the flower is a bit overpowereing. Your white faced would be a better cover in my opinion.
Cheers]
John

Nice one Andy, I do however have to agree with John here, the flower head is a touch too much...