Archive for the ‘dragonfly’ Category
Insects Mating after Feb 14th
The day after February 14th, we went for a family getaway in Batang Kali, Selangor where my uncle owns a piece of hillside land that includes a brook / river creek and a riverside shack.
Most of the family, after having breakfast, went for a dip in the brook and literally stayed there till evening. I joined them for a bit before grabbing my camera and traversed along the brook looking for small creatures to shoot. And I got a few that I liked.
Dragonflies Mating
I saw a pair of dragonflies flying around, one chasing the other, so I followed them until they stopped and landed on a blade of grass. The dragonfly in front started to attach the tip of its abdomen on the neck of the second dragonfly.
After that, the second dragonfly attached its abdomen tip onto the underside of the first dragonfly…
Hard to say which one’s male and which one’s female. I’d say the one behind is male. Notice that they form a kind of heart shape in the process. The nymphs are conceived in love!
The Mating Water Striders
Capturing any decent pictures of the water striders was really hard. I had a hard time focusing on any of them due to the small size, the amazingly clear water (made the AF focus on the objects in the water) and their superfast and sudden movements. I spotted an extraordinarily large one which wasn’t as fast as the others, and it wasn’t until I took a picture that I realized it wasn’t a large water strider, it was a pair of water striders mating!
You can kind of see how the weight of the both of them bend the surface tension of the water.
They also dance along the surface of the water while they’re at it!
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I have more pictures of other brookside insects, but let me save those for another post. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I enjoy sharing them with you.
Re-chasing Dragonflies
This is a repost of my old entry from last year. Mr. Jemsen asked me in my last post if I have any dragonfly photos and I actually do. Closeup dragonfly photos coming up! (italicized font indicate ‘flashback’) [Start flashback] … I took a stroll around the lake near the engineering building and saw a couple of dragonflies hovering above the grass… luckily I have a camera on hand so here you go… more pictures of bugs… this time, dragonflies. So it started out with noticing a dragonfly perched on a blade of grass… (see below) So I went in closer for a better shot… Closer… This was as close as I could get before it flew away. Next thing I knew there were a couple of these beautiful creatures hovering around me. I guess they got accustomed to my presence already. A shot of another dragonfly, I think I used the camera’s flash and -2 ev for this one. Screwed around some more with the camera’s settings for this shot. I like how the colors came out. There were countless failed attempts at snapping these insects in flight, the most you would ever be able to see is a brown blur in the middle of the photo, so I’m not including those. If only I have in my arsenal a camera fast enough to capture these flying arthropods in flight… … [End flashback] Comments about these old closeup photos are welcome!
