A day of dragonflies

July 27th was a very special day. Not only did we (@jamesyork and I) get to have breakfast with Roger and Sheila again (@rwedegis and @swedegis), we also had a TON of dragonflies hanging out in our yard all day, long into the evening.

I mean, I'm forever seeing them on the property, and I can usually grab a shot or two on a fairly regular basis (and sometimes they're even in focus...LOL), but this was an unusual amount. I'm not sure if there was some kind of dragonfly class reunion, or convention, or what, but I'm definitely not complaining!

These are the best of the shots I got that day, plus a couple of short videos at twilight. I stripped the audio from both clips (thank you, AudioRemover) because one had the dulcet tones of our air conditioner, and the other had some silly chit chat between hubby and I, but since one of our kids was mentioned, I decided to erase it.

For the technical side of things, I used my trusty Nikon COOLPIX P610 and handy dandy tripod (Amazon affiliate links - thanks for the pennies if you click through...LOL). I use the Auto Mode setting pretty much all the time, and typically bounce the exposure bias around between 0 and -2 step. Then I reduce and crop the shots, run them through PicMonkey if necessary to clean them up (can't tell you how much bird poop I've deleted from my photos), then they're ready for public viewing.

Here they are, in the order I snapped them. Hope you enjoy!
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Saw this fella when I was outside with Sandy for his morning constitutional. Good morning, Mr Dragonfly!
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One more pose for me before I headed back in to get ready to leave for breakfast
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When we got home, this little one landed on Jim's work van antennae
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Same guy, different angle
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Again, same guy - this time I was standing next to the van, standing on tiptoe! LOL!
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A little later in the afternoon, I spied this one posing near the daylilies
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He flew off, then came back to pose again
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Then I got the feeling I was being watching. Sure enough, this is what I saw when I looked to my right...
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I guess he wanted his picture taken too!
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It was hard to capture a picture of the swarming dragonflies at dusk (hence the videos) but this one wasn't too bad.

But you can really see the crowd in the video!

I did this short video three minutes after the first, because some blue sky showed up.

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