I Am In Love With Dragonflies… Thanks To My Phone

A year ago I got my new phone, a Xiaomi Mi 4i. What’s amazing about this phone is that it has a manual mode setting in the camera that you can use to change shutter speed, ISO and focus. Working with DSLRs before I was a little skeptic about these settings on a phone. But what I found out was amazing. Though these settings were controlled with sliders on the LCD screen, the 13MP camera with a f/2.0 aperture was by far the best mobile camera I’ve come across. It is amazing what a phone camera can capture.

I started taking a lot of pictures, especially macro focus images of insects. And we all know how much patience that needs. Making one tiny move or sound can scare them away, unless it is a snail, and you lose the focus set on the camera. But the best insect. I felt, to capture an image of, is a Dragonfly. Why? Because of their behavior.

Dragonflies sit on something and rest their wings. This happens in steps. You will find the wings in a little higher position in an alert dragonfly compared to the wings of a relaxed one. And once they are relaxed, you can just see the wings to know if the fly is alerted by you. Hence approaching the insect with caution is easier. If you make a sudden move or disturb it or the surrounding, or if the insect gets highly alert, it directly flies off hence we cannot directly approach it. Observing this one move of the insect helped me capture some amazing images of them and I am in love with them for the details they have on their bodies. The color patterns, the wing structure and transparency. Amazing creature.

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