Common darter front

[Jerry van Dijk]

Panasonic DMC-FZ18, handheld (IS), 83 mm (500 mm DSLR equivalent), ISO-100, F/4.2, 1/125 sec., pattern metering, EC 0, RAW. Increased sharpness and contrast a little.

This Common darter (Sympetrum striolatum) female kept returning to her perch in my vegetable garden, only to jump up from time to time to grab some passing insect for lunch. Ample time for some photographs! I posted the sideview earlier in this thread (http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=22468). If you get to spend some time with these dragons, you start noticing the amount of detail in their colors!
Doubted for a long time on the crop on this image and came up with the one presented here. Cropping more of the top to get the df out of the center line gave a very tight feeling, even when I included more canvas on the bottom. Any suggestions?
- Jerry -

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Jerry,
I like the composition, the eyes look a little soft. Suggestions: I would crop just a tad from the bottom to make it more of a tight pano crop and selective sharpen the eyes...:cool:

[Chris Starbuck]

Jerry,
I agree with Gus's comments. Some suggestions for the future: Since the dragons seem to like your garden, provide some more photogenic perches for them, placed (as much as possible) so that you'll have a really clean, distant background. Use a tripod, so you can get a bit more DOF (of course that will affect BG too, requiring a more distant BG to keep it OOF). Meanwhile, keep shooting and sharing; I enjoy seeing your DF images.

[Mike Moats]

Hey Jerry, I don't mind the crop. agree with Gus that the eyes looks a little soft, but can be easily fixed.

[Julie Kenward]

I agree with the others. It's a very nice image and the crop is about as good as its going to get unless you go for the pano version.

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi there, thanks for all the comments and suggestions! I tried selectively sharpening the eyes, which improved the image a little, but not as much as I liked to have seen. I guess it has to do with my camera quality, but also with the species. They don't have those nice gleamy eyes as some of the df's I see posted here. The top half consists of very small facets, the lower part is covered with tiny hairs, which gives a hazy look.
Chris, your suggestion to place some nice perches in good places is an excellent idea! More importantly, I have to remove the ugly ones. This df had a very strong preference for this ugly bamboo stick supporting my tomato's and refused to sit down on any other perches.
Thanks again!
- Jerry -