" Whistful Dragon " by Mark Cassino
Pretty much every picture I see of Mark's annoys me, and this one is no different. I can never get close enough to a live bug to get a picture of it, and this guy churns them out seemingly routinely, and always with nice composition. Having said this, the out of focus flower mid left is distracting, as is the just not quite enough DOF.
Thanks, Bill.
Here's another crack at it:
http://www.markcassino.com/temp/df_redo.jpg
It was the first shot in the series and the only one where the dragonfly's wings are up and out. To improve the background I cleared out all of the background distractions (a couple of buds and flowers), move the flower from the left to the right and added a small flower to the lower left to try to balance the composition a bit more (it's a little top heavy) and also to create a little tension along the diagonal (as the eye tries to link the purple spots.)
The tip of the tail still slips out of the DOF, and I'm tempted to take out the leaf to the right of the main flower but an obvious imperfection like that tends to derail speculation that the shot has somehow been manipulated. This shot hopefully presents the appearance of the dragonfly looking up and away at the distant flower in the upper right - of course, with compound eyes that cover almost a full spherical field of vision, they really don;t have to move their heads to look at things...
Hopefully it's an improvement!
- MCC ----- Mark Cassino Kalamazoo, MI -----
Photography:
http://www.markcassino.com
