DPReview.com is closing April 10th - Find out more

Dragonfly with the 28mm macro

Started Feb 19, 2018 | Photos thread
Nicholas Laidler
OP Nicholas Laidler Regular Member • Posts: 132
Re: Dragonfly with the 28mm macro

VisionLight wrote:

From the shadows, it looks like you used the on-board LEDs. Is that right?

I use both the pop-up flash and the lens LED's. I find it's always a battle to get enough depth of field and fast enough shutter speeds for hand-held macro. Even in bright sunlight I'll use the flash because I'm normally at something like F11 and 1/200 of a second. Since I'm generally forced to use flash I stick the ISO at 100, because why not at that point. The multiple light sources make white balance a bit of a pain. The pop-up flash on the M3 is pretty good at not shading subjects until you're right on top of them.

Also, how far were you from the dragon?

For these shots I think the dragonfly was something like 5 to 10 cm from the front of the lens. The first shot is cropped quite a lot so that the compound eyes show up better on a computer monitor. The second shot is cropped a little, more for framing than trying to make anything look bigger.

lens to come within an inch of their faces (I believe they see their reflections and will even have a "conversation" with it). This makes them a great subject for the short focal length of the 28.

They behave very well for macro subjects. I find they tend to fly fairly consistent paths, land in the same spots and like sitting in direct sunlight. Even if you scare them off by getting too close too quickly they tend to fly the same circuit and come back and land on the same spot that you scared them off from.

 Nicholas Laidler's gear list:Nicholas Laidler's gear list
Canon EOS M Canon EOS M3 Canon EOS M5 Canon EF 50mm F1.4 USM Canon EF-M 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM +4 more
Keyboard shortcuts:
FForum PPrevious NNext WNext unread UUpvote SSubscribe RReply QQuote BBookmark MMy threads
Color scheme? Blue / Yellow