Dragonfly

 This is my favourite dragonfly image. Many people had asked me "how did you take this picture?" or "what settings did you use?". Well, I am going to answer those questions today and hopefully is of help to you in your quest of shooting dragonflies and butterflies which moves constantly and are quite hard to lock focus to. Before going to that, I have an issue in my mind about posting shots of dragonflies and butterflies to the specified communities. I know, rules are rules but sometimes it is just so hard to stick to the rules when you have shots like this. To begins with, the rules stated that in macro shots, the subject must be 5cm and smaller and must fit the frame of the picture. That means if I were to post this particular picture, the dragonfly which by itself is larger that 5 cm in overall length and width will have to be cropped/cut into half and filled into the frame. Imagine what's left of the dragonfly? What about the beautiful background accompanying this beautiful species? Cut and throw away....photography is about producing nice beautiful pictures and is also an art. One would rather hang onto their walls this full picture rather than the ones that's been chopped here and there with only half the body and a big head without the backgrounds intact don't you think? In that case I chose not to post in respect to the community rules and not to flout the rules and get banned. Okay, now back to the main subject "what settings to use"
I am no expert on this but with the settings that I am using for this kind of shots  never fails. So here it is.
1) Set the ISO to auto. That's because you will be chasing after these guys up and down, back and forth so the light meterings are never constant. 2) Choose shutter priority mode. Important when your are chasing a fast moving butterfly for instant. Minimun 1/250 to 1/500 when handheld. 3) Since you will be shooting butterflies and dragonflies, macro lenses are hard to use. take out your zoom lens 55-200mm for instant (that's what I prefer to use) and zoom it to maximun 200mm. That should give you the nice bokeh you see in this picture. Don't worry about the aperture, in shutter priority mode the camera will optimises it for you automatically. 4) Set your light metering to center weighted for more accurate exposure to the subject. 5) Set your camera focus point to dynamic or 3D if your camera has it because you are going to have a hard time chasing and focusing this subjects and lastly 6) Set your camera to continuous shooting mode where when you pressed the shooting button the camera will shoots continuously as long as the button remained pressed and only shoots when focus i locked onto the subject. Your chances of getting a good and sharp focus shots will be increased. There, that's about it. Hopefully this helps and if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment in my blog. I will try my best to help and answer. Happy shooting and experimenting!