Photographed in Big Valley, California.
I captured these images when the dragonflies landed on the tops of some pieces of steel rebar that stick way up from a partially demolished hot tub.
These were shot in full daylight. I darkened the background by stopping down to F/16 or so at 1/500th, and used an on-camera TTL hotshoe flash to light the subject.
I got as close to the subjects as I could. The lens was a cheap 70-300mm zoom. It’s closest focusing distance is quite far, so these images were heavily cropped from a six megapixel RAW, despite being shot at 450mm equivalent focal length.
