Making of "The Dragonfly"

This photo was shot at Nikko, a popular tourist destination in Japan. The reason to take this photo was mainly for test the lens I bought recently. The results were satisfactory, specially with such old lens.

Equipments and Settings Used

• Camera: Pentax K-x (Hand-held)
• Lens: Pentax-A 35-70mm F4 SMC
• Shutter Speed: 1/250s
• Aperture: F4
• ISO: 400
• Shooting Mode: M
• File Format: RAW  

The picture was post-processed with Adobe Lightroom 4. The picture was cropped in 16x9 ratio, to fill the frame with the subject. The exposure was slightly raised. The contrast, vibrance, saturation and clarity were adjusted heavily to highlight the colors and details of the subject. The highlights were kept low to get rid of background details. The whites and blacks were also adjusted to extract the subject from the background. The sharpness of the original picture  was satisfactory, so I did not need to adjust the sharpness in post processing. I like the details of head and wing of the dragonfly. I am happy with what I was able to reach with post-processing and I consider this is a good achievement for me as a minimalist amateur photographer.

The original picture

- toaruna