Dragonflies 1, 2, 3...

At least how I like to do it :p

Step 1 - find a suitable subject
Step 2 - find a suitable shooting angle
Step 3 - put your equipment/experience to work

After I found my little model doing his thing (don't know exactly what as others of his kind weren't doing it), I picked a background I liked by positioning myself so that an open patch in the weeds was directly behind the D-fly so that I could get the little hairs on the thorax to show up (sorry for the run-on sentence).

Shot one - the background/angle I selected (can you see the d-fly? it is still there).

Shot two - the full-frame shot using a little pop-up flash fill as explained in the flash thread above.

As you all know, I consider the background just as important as the subject with macros. So much so that I use lighting and background to determine where I should be shooting. Then I look for a subject in that area. Sounds backwards, eh?

Here is the final crop.

The detail crop shows that a little more DOF may be preferred to keep more of the wings in focus. However, the background weeds begin to start getting distracting even when stopped down just one more stop.

300mm (no tubes)
ISO 100
f/6.7 at 1/250s

Beautiful shot, nice explanation too.

Ok Loupey i know that you did not use tubes for this one but when you use tubes with a 2x TCon in what order do you place them ? Tcon tubes lens or tubes tcon lens ?

scott-devon; thanks! hope it made some sense :p

Knight; I've never used BOTH tubes and TC at the same time. Because my particular 300mm is close focusing by itself (about 3 1/2') and I don't generally need really high magnification, I haven't come across a situation which called for it.

Depends on what you need: if you go, 300mm+2x+tube (in that order), you end up with a 600mm lens which you can close focus. You won't get much additional magnification from the tubes here - main effect will be making the focus closer (good if one has an older prime lens which won't focus close by itself).

On the other hand, if you go 300mm+tube+2x, you get a close focusing 300mm lens with the macro image doubled. Here the tube has a bigger effect on the magnification (a 36mm tube on a 300mm has a much greater effect than a 36mm tube on a 600mm). On top of that, the macro image is now multiplied by the TC.

Two completely different effects. Hope that made sense.

Thanks Loupey if i ever get off trouble call duty ill give it a try. :) Oops Sorry i forgot to mention good Capture on the Dragon :)