About 1985, Audubon Magazine published an article titled, "Blue in Nature." I realized how striking, and how relatively rare, blue animals are, and I've been pursuing them ever since. This is a Beautiful damoiselle (Calopteryx virgo), a type of damselfly I photographed it in Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia. These guys were everywhere. They hang around water and allow a close approach. I used a Canon 100-400mm telephoto which offers close focusing, and my settings were 1/160, f/16, and 640 ISO. To help maintain as much depth of field as possible, I made the back of the camera (i.e. the plane of the digital sensor) as parallel as possible with the folded wings of the insect. You can see that even with a small lens aperture and even with the parallel issue in mind, the tip of the tail is a bit soft. That occurred because the focal length used was 400mm, and the inherent loss of DOF was impossible to overcome with the f/16 aperture.
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