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Over the last two weeks I have been enjoying taking pictures of emerging dragonflies in the local city park. This park is very small and the 'ponds' are nothing more than shallow concrete structures (most of them leaking ...) with mud on the bottom. The park had been earmarked for destruction to make room for a bigger parking lot for the city theater. Fortunately in 2008 the financial crisis came to the rescue, the new theater didn't materialize and ten years later politics is still discussing what to do with the park (locals like the park, but parks don't make money like parking lots ...).
Although I knew there are plenty of dragonflies in the small park in summer, I hadn't expected to see dragonflies emerging from the ponds but suddenly there were plenty of them, maybe because the ponds almost went dry and the larvae realized this was their last chance to get out and become a dragonfly ;-) Metamorphosis is fascinating to watch, e.g. seeing how the wings expand to over 100x their packaged volume. What makes it even more interesting to me is that insect metamorphosis was discovered for the first time in my city (detailed observations published in 1660) by someone who lived on the border of the large pond/canal that later became this city park.
The emerging dragonflies (damselflies) in these images are small, the larvae are about 1 cm length and fully expanded damselflies are maybe 3-3.5 cm. Emergence usually happens away from the borders of the pond, to make life more difficult for photographers. As my 100-400II has IQ problems at closeup, I improvised by using my 55-250STM lens instead (sometimes with extension ring) which worked pretty well. And yesterday I was lucky enough to find one so close to the border than I could just use my 100L macro lens, always holding the camera above the water with arms stretched. I would love to use f/16-22 or focus stacking for better DOF, but it's not possible without putting a tripod in the water (maybe one day, but I already get enough funny looks with my current technique ...). I'm hoping to also find emerging true dragonflies, some big Anax / Aeshna species are present in the park but nobody seems to know where they are emerging (maybe in some private garden nearby?).
2017_11462 by Niek Haak, on Flickr
2017_11587 by Niek Haak, on Flickr
2017_11597 by Niek Haak, on Flickr
2017_12641 by Niek Haak, on Flickr
2017_12667 by Niek Haak, on Flickr
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