In your face!

[Jerry van Dijk]

Experimenting with slightly over the top images, hence the extreme closeup and boosted colors. Intended to generate the sensation expressed in the title. Guessing from the look on this fellow's face, he was thinking the same about me! Not really certain about the species (I photographed this one in Denmark), but my guess is Sympetrum sanguineum (Ruddy darter), because of the lack of yellow stripes on it's legs.
Your views on this image are highly appreciated!

Panasonic DMC-FZ18, handheld, 28 mm (170 mm eq.) w. Suntec 4+ closeup lens, ISO-100, F/8, 1/40 sec, EC -0.3, pattern metering, aperture priority, RAW.
RAW processing in Silkypix, PP in Corel Photopaint. Considerable crop for composition. Minor tweaks on exposure, levels and sharpness. Reversed S-curve adjustment in curves (a trick I learned from Robert Amoruso in the Landscape section) to recover detail from the shadows created by the backlight conditions.

[Christopher Miller]

Definitely looks like he's checking you out, Jerry! :) Really like the composition and pose.

Unfortunately, the lighting looks quite harsh to me. Also, I don't think the details are as well-defined as they could be, though they're not terrible. I frequently run into similar problems with my dragonfly photos, and I find what helps is to lower the exposure compensation, at least to -0.7 and sometimes lower, and to shoot with the sun behind you as much as possible.

[Julie Kenward]

Good advice from Christopher. I think you missed the focal point being on the eyes and got it just past that on his striped body. I agree that the "in your face" composition and the tightness of the frame are really great and well done but that light coming at you has really left the image with a harsh cast. Putting the light behind you will always yield a better end result with dragonflies as the light cuts right through those see-through wings.

[Jerry van Dijk]

Thanks for your comments. It was a bit difficult working with the backlight (no choice here), but I'm guessing that the harsh look is partly the result of my PP. I'll go back to the drawingboard to see if I can improve things. The lack of detail is the result of significant cropping combined with owning a small-sensor camera.