Eastern Amberwing Dragonfly (I think)

I was out in the yard when I saw this dragonfly sitting on the grass - I thought it was a big wasp at first, only about 1.5" long. Taken from about 3 feet from the focal plane of the camera (i.e. about 2' from the front of the lens hood). I crawled about 20 feet on my belly, moving as slowly/softly as I could chasing him across the grass, trying to get a little bit closer. I had mounted my flash, but found the 1/200sec shutter too limiting vs the faster speed I could get in natural light with a higher ISO while still maintaining enough DoF via aperture. Anyway, the flash and lens hood was probably the "scary" looking part of me trying to get close. Eventually he flew about and ended up close enough for this shot. Pretty heavy cropping, some color, contrast and brightness boost, USM in DPP with some Gaussian blur in the GIMP.

lovely detail and color

Doc is a big concern this close. Nice.

I mean depth of feild. Auto correct ducks sometimes.

I mean s u c k s.

heh, I have auto-correct turned off for most of my applications. I work in an industry where acronyms and initialisms are rampant, and often look like misspelled words (on purpose sometimes, sometimes just bad luck). e.g. Hardware-Software Integration, or HSI, gets corrected to HIS - which looks really annoying. I'd rather see the red squiggly lines and make the judgement myself, thankyouverymuch.

Anyway...after being relatively pleased with the above shot, I went out to see what else I could see. Got this guy: