Late Year Visit to Thursley.
Took a visit on the first weekend of October to Thursley Common in the hope of seeing some late darter dragonflies. The day was fairly sunny so I was not to be disappointed, as there were several black and common darters about. The warmth of the boardwalks were attracting them, so unfortunately I did not manage to get any on the heather like last year.
However I was lucky enough to get a full 1:1 shot of this clasped black darter by lying on the boardwalk next to them.
Female Black Darter being clasped by male
Before I mention the next Black Darter shots of the same individual, I’d better put the Common Darter in first.
Common Darter
The next set of shots are from an experiment I did in the field. As the subjects were static and the exposure is difficult to judge – I decided to shot some bracketed 3 shot bursts ( -1 1/3 , 0 & +1 & 1/3 ev). I figured this would give some latitude if the cameras metering got confused with all the dark subject on a bright board walk. Also I thought it would be interesting to see if an HDR of these would be any better than a normal conversion. As it happened the 0 ev shot was the one I used to process the single image shown below.
First I will show the single image with only RAW processing and then a 3 shot Exposure Fusion Merge in Photomatix of the same shot.
Black Darter – Single Image
Black Darter – HDR (3 shots fused in Photomatix).
Then I post processed both of these in Photoshop and Topaz Adjust 5 plugin.
Black Darter – Single Image – PP with Topaz Adjust.
Black Darter – HDR (3 shots fused in Photomatix) & PP with Topaz Adjust.
Finally I was trialing a new version of Topaz Labs Simplify 4 out – and this is the single image with that and Adjust used on it.
Black Darter – Single Image PP with Topaz Adjust & Simplify.
From this experiment I’m seeing little difference in the shots. So something I might try again, but at the moment don’t see any advantage in macro photography for it from these images.
