The Pink Dragonfly

The Species:

Common Name: Crimson Marsh Glider

Scientific Name: Trithemis aurora

It is a medium sized dragonfly that is commonly found in weedy tanks and ponds, marshes, channels, and slow flowing streams and rivers in the lowlands and mid-hills. It breeds in streams, rivers, canals, ponds and tanks. It is found commonly and widely distributed in the Oriental region throughout the year.

The Shot:

It has been about a month since I did any macro photography. So I headed over to the Singapore Botanical Gardens with fellow photographer Arun D. I was initially planning on doing some floral photography but I resorted to photographing dragon flies.

This is the result of a 12 shot composite stack. I'm still learning to master Focus stacking (here is a previous attempt) so this one took a while to process. My aging computer didn't help the cause either. Anyways, I loaded up all the shots on Photoshop and chose to Auto Align. Then Auto Blended. Once the shot came out, I applied a slight lens blur on the wings to take away some distracting details that had crept in. After that it was just a matter of a slight curves, levels and sharpening adjustments alone. In case you are new to Focus stacking, this youtube video would help a lot!

 EXIF:

ISO 400 | f/3.5 | 1/100 sec | Canon 100mm 2.8 USM with 68mm of tubes | about 12 shots stacked on PS