2011/08/21

Attempting photograph dragonflies in flight

Do insects sleep or do they just take breaks resting in their busy short lives?

Bumblebee "resting" on a blackberry leaf.

Sleepy Bumblebee
I sort of woke it up.

One of the photography skills I am trying to learn is to photograph a dragonfly in flight. It seems pretty easy given that they tend to fly in the same route and pause at similar spots. However, given my camera's poor ability to (track) focus moving objects, my best bet is to use manual focus.

So I pre-focused at a certain distance (say 1-m away from me) and clicked away when a dragonfly started to fly towards me. As you can tell, my attempts were pretty poor.

This was my best attempt. I zoomed out quite a bit to achieve greater success, hence the small image. I wonder if I would have done better with my OM 50 f1.4 lens.

Watched several Bushtits flying across a bike path.

Boat-watching at Finn Slough.

Tugboat

And this massive ship was behind it! And this photo only captured 2/3 of the ship!

Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica)
Barn Swallows at Finn Slough enjoying the sunshine.

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