Widow Skimmer

What’s a Widow Skimmer? The name may bring to mind a gigolo chasing after rich old ladies, but it is actually a strikingly beautiful dragonfly. I spotted this handsome male Widow Skimmer (Libellula luctuosa) on Monday at Jackson Miles Abbott Wetland Refuge in at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

When I took this shot, I was facing toward the sun. As a result, the body of the dragonfly is almost a silhouette. What was more important to me was the detail of the wings and I am happy I was able to capture some of the detail that was revealed as the light streamed through the almost transparent wings.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved

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Isolation

When I was first getting serious about my photography, I remember being told how important it was to isolate my subject in order to prompt the viewer to focus on what I thought was important. At this time of the year I take a lot of photos of insects and it is often a real challenge to isolate them from their backgrounds. As I was going through some images from this past weekend, I noted that I tried a couple of different approaches when photographing male Widow Skimmer dragonflies (Libellula luctuosa) at Jackson Miles Abbott Wetlands Refuge.

In one case, I tried to isolate the dragonfly by shooting at an upwards angle, thereby eliminating the clutter of the vegetation. Of course, it helped that the dragonfly cooperated by perching at the tip of the stem. I really like the way that the colors and shapes of the background almost match those of the dragonfly.

In a second case, the dragonfly was perched in the midst of the vegetation. I moved to a position so that my camera’s sensor was on a parallel plane to the dragonfly’s open wings and opened the aperture pretty wide. Normally I try to keep the aperture stopped down in an effort to get more parts of the dragonfly in focus. This time, however, the dragonfly was relatively flat and I was able to throw the background a bit out of focus without losing the details of the dragonfly. The contrast of the background colors with those of the dragonfly helps it to stand out, while retaining a sense of the environmental setting.

There are lots of other ways to isolate subjects. Sometimes we have the luxury of being able to think about them, but often we are forced to make rapid decisions about shooting angles and camera settings that will have a huge impact on our final images.

 

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

 

 

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Not preying on widows

What is a Widow Skimmer? It sounds like a con artist who preys on rich older women, but it actually is a beautifully patterned dragonfly, like this juvenile male that I spotted recently at Huntley Meadows Park.

Why is it called a “widow?” According to bugguide.net, the species name of the Widow Skimmer (Libellula luctuosa) “means sorrowful or mournful, perhaps because the wings of both male and female seem to be draped in mourning crepe.” Only the male has white patches on its wings, so it’spretty easy to identify the dragonfly in the image as a male. Adult males have blue bodies and juvenile males and females have yellow and brown bodies.

Sometimes I wish that the identification of dragonfly species were this easy all of the time, but real life is generally much more complicated.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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Dramatic dragonfly

I love the dramatic lighting, the graphic quality, and the simple composition of this shot of a male Widow Skimmer dragonfly (Libellula luctuosa) that I took earlier this month at Jackson Miles Abbot Wetlands at Fort Belvoir, a nearby military installation here in Virginia.

There is a real beauty in simplicity.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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Centered

It violates one of the basic rules of photography to have your subject in the center of an image, but for both of these shots of a male Widow Skimmer dragonfly (Libellula luctuosa), that’s precisely what I did.

In the first image, the blade of grass that bisects the image helps to emphasize the symmetric patterns on the wings of the Widow Skimmer.

In the second image, I was so fascinated by the geometric lines of the grass and their varying degrees of sharpness that I did not want to crop them at all, so I left the Widow Skimmer more or less in the center.

When it comes to my photography, I tend to look at “rules” as general guidelines that apply in many—but not all—situations. That approach helps me to remain centered and flexible.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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Widow Skimmer

Flying slowly and weakly with its patterned wings, a male Widow Skimmer dragonfly (Libellula luctuosa) looks amazingly like a butterfly as it flutters by. Fortunately this one stopped to perch on some vegetation at the edge of a small stream and I was able to get this shot.

This was the second time that I have seen a male Widow Skimmer this spring. It’s easy to tell that this is a male, because the females do not have the white spots on their wings. When I saw one last month, though, it was a little tougher to make the call. Immature male Widow Skimmers look a lot like females, as is the case with many dragonfly species. The colors of “fresh” dragonflies tends to be pale and wing patterns may not have developed fully yet. The photo below provides a pretty clear view of the “claspers” at the tip of the abdomen, which indicates that this is a male. Eventually he will grow up and begin to look more like the mature Widow Skimmer in the first photo.

Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Widow Skimmer in the distance

Although I usually try to get close up for my dragonfly photos, I am unusually pleased with this image I took yesterday of an immature male Widow Skimmer dragonfly (Libellula luctuosa), which has an artistic quality that is not always found in my close-ups.

For those who might be curious about the identification, the white on the wings indicates that it is a male (females have only dark blotches) and the yellow and black body indicates that it is immature,because adult males have bluish-colored bodies.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved

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