Friday, May 22, 2009

Happy Accidents


Staring You Down III
Originally uploaded by Dalantech.
One of the things that I'm trying to do this year is shoot in different places, to not get in the habit of looking in the same spots all the time because it's a great way to shoot the same subjects... boring...

So I went to the opposite end of Lago d'Averno hoping to see something new but was walking back to my car empty handed when I spotted some mature dragonflies trying to warm up and dry off. I'm not sure where they were perching for the night, but they were definitely making their way back toward the water when I stopped to photograph the critter in this post. Concerned that it was too awake to let me cut the perch and move it, and the simple fact that I'd be cutting a flower that was part of a recent landscaping project, I decided to shoot the damselfly by holding onto the perch with my left hand and just rest the lens on that same hand to keep everything steady. But the critter was at the end of a flower stalk so I had to grab onto the stalk behind it.

Now I have a new technique to add to my bag of tricks :)

Since my fingers are behind the damselfly they acted as a reflector for the light from the flash -but because they are almost twice as far from the light as the critter they came out about a stop under exposed and the color saturated. Instead of a black background I got a nice bright one that really makes the critter stand out.

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