Female Calico Pennant

[Ken Childs]

Canon EOS REBEL XT
Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS @ 400mm
Manual mode
1/400"
F10
ISO: 200
LR & CS3

I've had a hard time deciding how to crop this image. The best choice would be a portrait crop but there isn't any more space at the bottom of the original to be able to do this. The original has the head pretty much centered.

[Julie Brown]

Excellent detail on the head, legs, and perch here Ken! This is a cool bug. I find dragonflies hard to get sometimes because the wings and body are in different planes. Nice BG too. I don't know how else you could have cropped it either.:)

[Allen Sparks]

Very nice image. Love the head detail. I like the crop just fine. nice background too.

[Julie Kenward]

Boy, Ken, you had me really scratching my head on the crop for awhile...then I realized I needed to bring him forward in the frame and not try to set him back. I finally added a bit of canvas to the left side and the bottom of the image and it put his eye/face almost perfectly in the ROT's position. Normally, we'd think he should have room in front of him (to imaginarily fly "into") but here, I think this works. See what you think...

Lovely details and I can't get over that double octagon shaped catchlight in his eye. Fantastic!

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi Ken, another nice dragonfly. I like the details you captured on the wings. I do feel that the colors are a little bit cold. I might try to adjust the white balance settings if you shot this in RAW.
Regarding the composition: I like the image as presented as well as Jules' more unusual version.
I often find myself choosing a panaromic crop (e.g. 9:16), because of the dominant vertical lines of the dragonflies. With canvas added on the right, this might work good on this image as well.

[Ken Childs]

Jules, i originally tried a similar crop to your version and it just doesn't look right to me. Even though it fits the ROT, it still looks unbalanced, IMO.

What I'm taking from this is that I probably should have stepped back a little and turned the camera on its side.

[Markus Jais]

Beautiful shot. Great sharpness and wonderful background.
I think your crop works perfect. The placement in the center works very well here.

Markus

[Vida van der Walt]

Beautiful image Ken. I like your comp as I always like the space to be in the front of the insect. Love the angle of this shot. Apart from maybe warming up the bg colour and perch slightly, there is nothing else I would change in this great image.:)

[Harshad Barve]

This is excellent image , lovely freeze of wing and nice BG here, My choice is OP
TFS

[Charissa]

Macro with a 100-400!! I battle to get birds (big ones) sharp with mine, so to me, this is perfect. Can,t believe the detail u get on such a small subject, with the lens. Excellent.

[Ken Childs]

Macro with a 100-400!! I battle to get birds (big ones) sharp with mine, so to me, this is perfect. Can,t believe the detail u get on such a small subject, with the lens. Excellent.
Thanks, Charissa.
I've found that with the 100-400, I can get sharp images at 400mm if the subject is close but anything over 20 feet away seems to lose something at full magnification. I can't explain why this is.