I took these pictures of damselflies (banded demoiselle, Calopteryx splendens) in Ladderedge Country Park. I first noticed them flitting about on a walk by the canal feeder. I’d never seen them before and I’ve always admired photographs of these insects, so I made a note to go back with my camera. I re-visited the site over the next two days with a long lens and a tripod.

But getting photographs of a damselfly in flight seemed impossible at first. Unlike birds, they don’t seem to give off any signal that they are about to take flight and by the time you’ve noticed, the damselfly is already out of your frame. So for the in-flight shots I used the Olympus Pro Capture feature, which buffers half-a-second’s worth of images but doesn’t store them until you depress the shutter. So, as long as I could react in about half a second, I should get a shot.

This kind of photography pushes Micro-Four-Thirds camera technology to its limits. To reduce motion blur, I needed to shoot at a fast shutter speed (at least 1/2000s). That meant I needed to use a high ISO setting (at least ISO 1600) and a wide aperture (f/6.3 was the widest on my lens). At a 400mm focal length (equivalent to 800mm on a full frame camera) this results in a very narrow depth of field. The consequence of all this is that just a few of the in-flight shots have the eyes in focus. I burnt through my memory card with Pro Capture shots (60 per second) but I did manage to get a couple that were in focus.

The canal bank was covered in reeds and grass and this made it difficult to get a tidy frame. It’s hard to clear things away, because as soon as you move, the damselfly takes flight. So I’ve done some post-processing on these images to remove distractions.