Top 10: 4. Male azure damselfly

by Darren

We’re getting close to the end of this now, and while sharing my top 10 with you I’ve also been filling up this new blog/website with posts.

Because I now work underwater, more distance between the end of the lens and the subject means more water for the light to pass through, which in turn means less available light and more distortion of colour.  I now have a macro lens but it’s only a recent acquisition.

I have often tackled small subjects from a distance with a 300mm F4 lens and a 1.4x converter which works surprisingly well.  With subjects such as this damselfly, getting up close would have probably disturbed it anyway.  The trick here is that converters don’t tend to affect focussing distance so adding one on to a lens with a relatively short focussing distance already can pay dividends.

The other thing I use now is a 25mm extension tube which again helps with focussing distances and is really useful on super telephoto lenses where the focussing distance is 4.5m.  It’s also nice on the 100mm macro with a 2x converter which allows me to get great magnifcation on tiny insects (at the cost of losing autofocus).  Expect a future top 10 to include at least one image of an ant!

Apologies if this post is a little technical for some readers – I like to try and provide some variety in my posts and normal service will be resumed for the top 3.

Posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 7:14 pm. Filed under: Other Tags: colourful, damselflies, damselfly, gardens, insects, technical details, UK RSS 2.0 feed.