Hello,
I have wanted to shoot this photo for quite some time. It is an Australian emperor dragonfly (Anax papuensis) under UV light. I have shown posts of this dragonfly before, it is the most common dragonflies I find near my home and occasionally I am lucky to find one sleeping and can get some very nice close ups. Under normal light they have a dull gold/bronze colour with black and yellow markings along its tail. One feature I really like about this species is the cat mask markings they have just before the tail
The original photo I took had so much glowing dust, fluff and even spiderwebs over the dragonflies wing that I considered not using the shot and wait for another attempt, I also tried using a rocket blower over the sleeping dragonfly's wings and the plant in the background with not much success
, in the end I chose to clean up the photo with some photoshop, it took a lot longer than I wanted and ended up being the most time consuming part of the photo but I really wanted a UV dragonfly shot for a long time so I kept at it and managed to do a decent job with the cleanup. I also used some of the out of focus glowing bits to add bokeh light balls under the wings. I did manage to get shots where I was more squared with the wings but I chose this angle as it created more different textures in the wings, going from out of focus, soft lines to sharp cells/panels within the wings. I hope you like it....
As a comparison, here is the photo before the cleanup..
I have wanted to shoot this photo for quite some time. It is an Australian emperor dragonfly (Anax papuensis) under UV light. I have shown posts of this dragonfly before, it is the most common dragonflies I find near my home and occasionally I am lucky to find one sleeping and can get some very nice close ups. Under normal light they have a dull gold/bronze colour with black and yellow markings along its tail. One feature I really like about this species is the cat mask markings they have just before the tail
The original photo I took had so much glowing dust, fluff and even spiderwebs over the dragonflies wing that I considered not using the shot and wait for another attempt, I also tried using a rocket blower over the sleeping dragonfly's wings and the plant in the background with not much success
, in the end I chose to clean up the photo with some photoshop, it took a lot longer than I wanted and ended up being the most time consuming part of the photo but I really wanted a UV dragonfly shot for a long time so I kept at it and managed to do a decent job with the cleanup. I also used some of the out of focus glowing bits to add bokeh light balls under the wings. I did manage to get shots where I was more squared with the wings but I chose this angle as it created more different textures in the wings, going from out of focus, soft lines to sharp cells/panels within the wings. I hope you like it....
As a comparison, here is the photo before the cleanup..
)
