The glory of the forest

[Prajwal J Ullal]

ID: Clear winged Forest glory(Vestalis gracilis)

One of the biggest form of damsefly, usually seen along the forest area of the Southern India, these beauties, atleast in my encounters, are seen close to some water source, and this particular one, with the extended monsoon, was just a few meters away from the massive water body. Rather there were atleast three of them that preferred this part of the area and kept on flying off and settling back on the tip of the leaf. With the covering of the tree, the background, with high illumination from the sun's light, brought in an interesting drama for the frame.

EXIF:
Canon 80D
Canon 100mm macro
F/4.5(to get the round bokeh)
Shutterspeed 1/160
ISO 400
Handheld, External flash fired(fill in)
Location: Chowki, kasargoad, Kerala

[Mrudul Godbole]

I loved the different shades of green in the image. Good composition. The face is not in critical focus, maybe it just moved when you clicked. After seeing this image, I recalled that I had also photographed a similar damselfly a few years back in a small stream in Bandipur :). Thanks for sharing.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

If you move in very close to the subject ie. if you are able to reduce the camera to subject distance, then the background will mostly come out of focus even with narrow aperture. In my view the lack of sharpness of the head is the biggest weakness in this otherwise lovely image. The tail and wings are perfect. The head is ahead of the focal plane. Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Prajwal J Ullal]

Sabyasachi Sir, I did experiment with different aperture values, somehow, probably due to the distance from the background light, the bokeh/lighting at the back seemed to look powerful enough around this f value, so kept it so low, in other frames the impact wasnt that great, ofcourse all this was at the cost of sharpness. Wanted to try focus stacking, but couldnt manage it as I didnt have any support