Okay, Let's Wrap This Up

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Trotting out a few last dragonflies due to a general lack of new material. Unless there is a special event, I usually do my blog photo-trolling on weekend afternoons. It's just been too unpleasant to spend time out on the surface of this blasted part of the planet lately. I'll scrape up an Arch picture for tomorrow somewhere.

The insects are fascinating, though. They look like they have vertebrae made up of tiny neon tubes.

Should be an big image haul soon, though. If all goes according to plan, on Friday morning I'll get to meet and photograph St. Louisan and rock-n-roll legend Chuck Berry at the dedication of a statue of him. (The sculptor invited me. Details on Saturday, I hope.) This weekend is The Lou's annual artists' open studios weekend. About 160 artists open their work and gallery spaces to the public. You can go from one to another, meeting, talking and seeing. I make the rounds, asking the artists if I can take candid portraits of them with their work. I get some good results, like this one from last year.

Life Cycle

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A water lily bud, floating in black water, barely breaking open. A neon dragonfly finds sustenance within it. I know little about plant biology. Do the dragonflies benefit the plant as bees do when they spread pollen from one flower to another?

A couple of commentators to yesterday's post said they liked the macro work but these aren't macro shots at all. They were taken with a 100-400 mm zoom at 400 mm, f 5.6, 1/200 sec., ISO 200 on a Canon 7D, which has a 1.6 crop factor. Then they were cropped a bit more in the computer. Not nearly as sharp as I'd like but that's what you get with even a good telephoto zoom compared to a prime lens. The final image was heavily massaged in Photoshop but I care about the destination, not the route.

But I'm not a nature photographer...

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Nature photography is very popular but it's not my cup of tea. Readers of this blog know that I'm more of a street shooter, along with some architecture, unusual landscapes, bad weather and a taste for irony. No amazing hummingbirds or charming old barns in fall foliage. (That's why I stopped going to the competitions and shows of the St. Louis Camera Club. I thought that if I saw one more beautifully made image of a barn I was going to scream.)

But, as someone always says, rules are made to be broken. I was at the Missouri Botanical Garden yesterday to shoot a small event (hey, some puppets later this week!). However, my attention was drawn to the several lily ponds, buzzing with silver and metallic blue dragonflies slurping on the flowers. I couldn't resist. More to come.