Giant Darner feeding

[Dan Brown]

This Giant Darner, North America's largest Odonate, is feeding on a White-belted Ringtail. The Giant Darner rarely land except to feed, so we were definately in the right place at the right time when this male decided to catch this Ringtail and land at our eye level!
He ate every part except the wings and then flew away (no belch:D:D).

Captured with a Nikon D200, 80-400mmVR at 400mm, 1/1000th sec, f8, ISO 400, manual exp mode, spot meter mode, fill flash with SB800 -2.0. PP in CS3, cloning and quick masking hear and there, cropped about 50%.

Dan Brown

[Joanna Trescott]

Wow...great focus and nice colors. I have never caught one of these except in flight.Thanks for the description.

[Ed Vatza]

Cool image overall. I wonder why you cropped in like you did? I think I would like to see more body and wing. (But maybe not! :)) Colors looks great. But I would like to also see more dof to bring the legs and right wings into better focus.

[Dan Brown]

Thanks for the comments guys. I cropped this shot because the BG was way too busy and there was no chance to fix it. Here's a shot of the whole body showing the looooong tail, messy BG and the Ringtail's tail end in orange. Exif same as the first post except that this post is a photomerge of four shots (wing+thorax+wing+tail) and I had to clone in the bottom two corners because I should have made a few more shots covering these areas and didn't:( Dan

[Mike Moats]

Hey Dan, make sense why you cropped tight. I like tight shots so it works for me. Great details.