I always wonder if a photo like this is a macro shot or just a regular close-up. Maybe if I hadn’t seen other photos with a similar scale of detail, I wouldn’t have been able to decide. I took this photo quite a while ago—actually, a very long time ago—with my first digital SLR. I remember the salesperson’s surprise—he tried to talk me out of buying that model, but I insisted because it was the smallest and lightest in Nikon’s lineup. It was the Nikon D3000, about which legend has it that Nikon bought two train cars full of subpar CCD sensors from Sony and, not knowing what to do with them, released the D3000. Indeed, the sensor was terrible—ISO 200 was the maximum acceptable sensitivity; above that, it was just noise, noise, noise, with no dynamic range or detail. But it had the best color reproduction—it wasn’t until the D850 that a sensor could match it. And I also had (and still have) the D7100, D7200, and D750.
To take this photo, I used a Tamron 70-300 (just as good as the camera body) with an extension ring. The rest was standard—Lightroom.
And in the photo are two male banded damselflies (Calopteryx splendens). How do I know they're males? Because I overheard them making plans to go out for a beer—and what else can they tell their wives?
