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Old 26-12-05, 01:50
windyridge50 windyridge50 is offline  
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Wiltshire
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The most important thing is to observe your prey. With dragon flies there are two broad families, hawkers and darters. darters are creatures of habit, they patrol their territory but stop regulalry for periods of several minutes at one or two regular stopping points and can easily be approached to within a few inches without problems. Hawkers tend to fly all day, catching their food on the wing but rest overnight and can not fly in the morning until the dew on their wings has dried so you need to be up at the crack of dawn or try to capture them in flight (flash is useful here). Butterflies are similar to darters and will often rest to collect nectar for long periods just moving in a small area, as long as you don't cast a shadow you'll be OK. I always use a tripod as to get a dragonfly or butterfly pin sharp all over will require an aperture of at least f16, f32 for small butterflies such as the skippers or small blue where you will be working at an image magnification of 1. for these smaller insect a macro lens in the 180mm-200mm is ideal as you will still be working at around 12". For small dragon flies and damselflies such as the sympetrum and coenagrionidae which are around 2" long you will need to work at a magnification of around 0.5 with an APS-C sensor. but at the end of the day you need patience, I one stalked a green hairstreak for over 5 hours and still didn't get a shot. I will post some shots later.
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