Summer isn’t my favourite time for landscape photography. The greens are lush but hard to handle, and the light’s rarely interesting unless you get up at 4am. Fortunately, there are other interesting subjects to point a camera at in the summer, so I decided to try a dragonfly and damselfly project.

There’s a disused quarry about 40 minutes from home that hosts a good range of species. I visited three times over a few weeks and discovered that photographing dragonflies and damselflies was some of the hardest photography I’ve ever attempted.

I’ve photographed banded demoiselles before, and they’re skittish. But this species, the common blue damselfly, let me get within inches.

A wary glance from a damselfly perched on a reed, clearly unsure about having its photo taken. Shooting handheld at just six inches away meant working with a very shallow depth of field, so I couldn’t get sharpness in both the perch and the insect. But I think that narrow focus on the damselfly creates a more intimate shot and draws you into the damselfly’s gaze.

I spotted this damselfly resting on a stick and took a burst of images. It was only later, back at home, that I noticed a lucky coincidence: the empty shell of a dragonfly clinging to the same stem. This is the exuvia—the shed skin left behind when a dragonfly completes its final moult and transforms from aquatic nymph to airborne adult.

Dragonflies spend most of their lives underwater as predators, often for a year or more. When they’re ready, they crawl out of the water and anchor themselves to vegetation. Then, in a slow, delicate process, the adult dragonfly emerges from the back of the nymph’s body, leaving this ghostly casing behind. I’m not sure how often I would need to visit this location to get an image of a dragonfly emerging but it’s certainly on my bucket list.

I like the way this photograph captures that transition: one insect pausing, and the evidence of another that’s already taken flight.

I found taking photographs of dragonflies in flight to be a hit and miss affair (mainly miss). They zigzag unpredictably, and no focusing mode seemed to keep up. In the end it just came down to luck.

Taken using a technique photographers call “spray and pray”. For every shot like this, I had hundreds that were out of focus or missed the frame entirely. Photographing dragonflies in flight is the most technically demanding thing I’ve tried, with maybe a 1% hit rate.

One of my favourite “in flight” compositions, though I didn’t quite nail the settings. I’d been photographing other dragonflies at rest and forgot to crank up the shutter speed when I switched to catching others in flight. At 1/2000s, the body is sharp, but the wings are still a blur. Experience tells me I should have used at least 1/4000s to freeze them in flight. Still: I like the energy of it.

Despite being more agile, Common Darters are actually easier to photograph in flight than the larger Emperors. Their smaller size makes them quicker to acquire in the viewfinder, especially once you’ve clocked their flight pattern.

One trick to getting an image of a dragonfly in flight is to find one laying eggs, and then take a photograph of it when it takes off. Ovipositing females always take off the same way: up, fast, and straight. I was lucky and she hovered just long enough for me to get this shot.

One of the hardest parts of photographing dragonflies at rest is finding a clean background. They tend to perch in places that hide them from predators—not places that give you that creamy bokeh photographers like. My approach was to grab a quick safety shot, just to get something in the bag. Then I’d shift position to improve the background. If the insect hadn’t flown off, I’d move again for something better. This female emerald damselfly froze just long enough for me to make a couple of adjustments and line up the shot before she headed off.

This is another example of using the technique of shifting position to improve the background. I took a quick safety shot, then edged around until I could line up a cleaner, more even-toned background. It’s a simple technique, but it can make the difference between a record shot and something more intentional. You just need to make sure that every move you make is slow and deliberate to avoid scaring the insect away.

Not my cleanest image, but I was glad to capture this species at all. Broad-bodied Chasers are easy to overlook: fast-flying, and at rest they often sit low among the reeds. Until I started this project, I hadn’t realised just how many dragonflies and damselflies we have, or how intricately marked and subtly different they can be.

Common blue damselflies at rest offer a great opportunity for technically simpler shots compared to capturing them in flight. However, photographing them well still demands a fair bit of flexibility and patience: to get the right angle and a unique perspective, you need to lie flat on the ground at the pond's edge.

The bruisers of the dragonfly world: fast, loud, and fearless. Sometimes I’d hear a fizz like an electrical short-circuit as two collided mid-air. I caught this one among the reeds: an environment that made for tricky photography but tells an authentic story of where they live.

These damselflies were doing their best to mate but were continually bombarded by rival males trying to break up the pair and stake their claim. Eventually, they flew off into the vegetation — the insect equivalent of getting a room.

Dragonfly mating is a spectacle: the male clasps the female behind the head, and she curls her abdomen forward to collect sperm from a specialised structure on his body. The pair create a shape known as a mating wheel. I spotted them mid-air as they linked up, then watched as they landed on these leaves to finish the job. It’s always a trade-off: capture the behaviour in a natural setting, or miss it chasing the perfect backdrop. This time, the behaviour won.

I tried (and failed) to get a sharp shot of this dragonfly in flight, so I was relieved when it paused to lay eggs. At first I photographed it while I was standing up, but I’ve learned the best bug shots happen at eye level, which meant lying flat beside the pond. With the sun too bright for the LCD, I had to crane my neck to peer through the viewfinder.

Dragonflies aren’t just beautiful: they’re challenging, frustrating, and rewarding to photograph. I came away from this project with a sore neck, a few lucky shots, and a lot more respect for insect photographers. If you're looking for a project to push your creative and technical limits this summer, look no further than your local pond. You might be surprised by what you find.