Not one but two..

.. common darters in flight. This is an ovipositing pair. After mating the female bobs up and down dipping her abdomen into the water, dropping eggs. The male continues to hang onto her to make sure the kids are his. Taken with 75-300 (semi) macro tele. C&C appreciated.

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Aw, nice one Mike. Always nice to see more on the way for the future

Linda

Lovely tandem shot
Brian V.

Great capture Mike!!

Now you're showing off...

Great capture eccles. Now that's going to extremes to ensure your genes are promoted.

Great DIF shot eccles. Well done.

Well done!!

Good capture Eccles, mating DIF shots now...hard to top

Dave

Hi Eccles brilliant shot
I've watched these doing this in our local pond, facinating
Pete

Thanks all. I thought the reddish colouration of the female was surprising. If I'd seen her on her own I'd have said she was a male. But males don't lay eggs.

Nice shot sir. I'm jealous.
I tried my hand at DIF the other day. My hats off to you guys that can do it.
My first try wasn't awfull, but it wasn't ready for prime time either.

Great capture! i tried to get them in flight with my 100-400, but they're too fast! Nice one!

Thanks again. Shooting with manual focus does the trick for me. That way there's no wait for it to traverse the whole focussing range if it misses before it tries again. I set the focus about where I think the DF will fly to so that it's hopefully less than a quarter turn to snap it into focus. My 75-300 has a fairly close focus which is rather ambitiously called 'macro', but it's good enough for dragonflies and I've had better success with it for in-flight dragonlfies than with the 105 Sigma macro. Needless to say I still get a whole lot of stuff that goes straight into the bin.

Hiya Mike,

Excellent capture/shot, damned if I don't find these hard enough to capture singly well done.
Hope your weather's better up there in Brizol than here as it's raining somewhat & blowing half a gale

Cheers for now
Mark

Great shot! I sat out the other day for an hour trying to get a focused shot of just one with my 300/f4... I'd given up until I saw your shot... now I'll keep trying... thanks for posting!