Dragonflies are beautiful animals. However, unless they’re in a very accessible location (see below), their elongate body shape and large transparent wings make them challenging to photograph.
There’s almost always something in the way: sometimes it’s a distracting background, sometimes their own wings block their face:
And if you’re unable to net them and force them into the perfect pose, as the authors of one wonderful book did, you might have to get creative with your photo processing. Fortunately, image processing software has gotten really good over the past decade.
It used to be a fairly long and involved process to align and stack images. But all the way back to at least Photoshop 4, Adobe enabled photographers to auto-align and auto-blend. The results weren’t always perfect, but they were pretty good.
I recently updated my software to the dread subscription model, which allows me to use the more recent developments. And I have to say, the jump in quality from CS4 to the “2020” suite is impressive. I’m not going to do a comparison, but I have shown some image stacking in the past (dragonfly, butterfly, damselfly).
Here, though, is what I did this morning with a Little Blue Dragonlet (Erythrodiplax minuscula) that I was able to get quite close to but not from an angle where I could get the necessary depth of field for any single image to be decent.
And here, after aligning them, stacking them, and doing a bit of cropping and color adjustment, is the resulting image:
Thank you for your explanation. He/she is so beautiful. And a cute little head. I remember there were lots of big ones around when i was a child in Maryland.
This is a male. The female little blues are yellow. Makes sense, right?
I followed Mike Powell’s link to your great article on dragonfly eyes and found it excellent. And now I’ve found this one about focus-stacking, which has caught my interest for quite a while, but I didn’t realize that one could do it in PS-2020. Now I can’t wait to learn how. Great post! BTW, our names are close; mine starts with a B. Also, are you any relation to Papa John Kolstad?
Glad you enjoyed the articles, Gary! I still need to refine my own focus-stacking technique, but I’m glad they helped point the way for you.
An acquaintance of mine told me several years ago that she had met someone named Ken Bolstad, which I always thought was a pretty cool name buddy, although I never met him.
As far as Papa John Kolstad: I wish I could claim relation; his music is awesome! As far as I know, he’s part of a big bunch of Kolstads that come from Minnesota. I don’t think that we’re related except insofar as our names probably come from the same place in Norway a few generations back.