Black Darters Finale

This is the finale in the Black Darter dragonfly (Sympetrum danae) photos found over at Christchurch Common near St Catherine’s Hill, though unlike the previous two posts I did not use Topaz Studio in my post processing workflow.

Instead I used a mixture of other Topaz Labs products, mainly DeNoise and Detail, though for the 1st I used Topaz Glow.

This next one is without Topaz Glow so you are able to get an idea as to one of the products effects.

I visited Christchurch Common on several occassions over the course of a few weekends to get these photos, and I alternated between two Olympus lenses across these, either the legacy Olympus 90mm F2 macro lens or the digital Olympus 60mm F2.8 lens.

The Olympus 60mm F2.8 lens provides you the opportunity to use focus bracketing with the Olympus OM-D EM5 MarkII camera, as I did here with this image, taking 5 shots and then aligning and stacking in photoshop.

By contrast this next set were taken with the legacy Olympus 90mm F2 lens, a lens originally designed to be used with a film camera, as there are adaptors that allow you to continue to use this lens with Olympus’s digital camera’s.

These next two show why this dragonfly is so named, the adult male is black.

and finally and out of character of this post and the two before, a record shot of a rare damselfly that may be seen at Christchurch Common, a Red-eyed Damselfly (Erythromma najas).