Mouth-of-Cottonwood Creek Wildlife Area - 10 April 2005

My third photography trip this season, on April 10th, was also the third trip of the year to Mouth-of-Cottonwood Creek Wildlife Area. We'd had a cold spell and that Sunday was the first nice day in about a week: the sky was clear and the temperature was about 70 degrees. Several Beaverpond Baskettails were patrolling along the tree shaded gravel road leading to the ponds. There was also a bigger dragonfly flitting about, probably a California Darner. Painted Lady butterflies were abundant. There were also a few sulfurs, Pipevine Swallowtails, a crescent, and my first Lorquin's Admiral of the year. The water in my favorite pond had dropped about eight inches since the previous trip, four weeks before. Dragonflies were completely absent from this and two other ponds that I inspected. Black-fronted and Pacific Forktails were relatively common at all the ponds and at one pond I found an adult male Western Forktail. The west end of the favorite pond had an area full of red swamp grass (botanist I'm not) that showed up well in a couple of the photographs (see below).

These pictures were taken without the 1.4X teleconverter I had been using the previous two trips. This allowed me to set the flash on 1/4 power (for the damselflies; 1/2 power for the Painted Ladies) which provides a flash duration of approximately 1/4000 second (full power is about 1/1000 second). For any of you who use the Canon EOS 10D, I also changed my color space from Adobe RGB to sRGB and cranked up the color saturation one notch. This gave punchy photographs right out of the camera, which reduced computer processing quite a bit (I had only to apply sharpening and to slightly tweak some other settings).

PICTURES ARE BEST VIEWED IN 1024X768 OR HIGHER RESOLUTION. ALSO, IF USING 1024X768, IT WOULD HELP IF YOU PRESS THE "F11" KEY TO TOGGLE ON THE "FULL SCREEN" FUNCTION. If you don't, depending on your browser settings, the picture may be automatically resized to fit the screen and picture quality will suffer.

Black-fronted Forktail, male (Ischnura denticollis). The male Black-fronted is a very attractive damselfly. The ones in Shasta County have a greenish cast to the thorax, but I've seen photographs where the thorax and underside of abdominal segments 1 and 2 and 8 through 10 are blue. On this individual, the top of segments 8 and 9 are deep blue, but the color was washed out by the camera flash.

Black-fronted Forktail, female. I'm calling this a Black-fronted because the stigmas are dark, not pale. However, the darker thorax resembles that of an adult female Pacific Forktail.

Pacific Forktail, young male. This photograph was taken using fill flash, the settings being aperture priority automatic, high-speed flash synchronization, and ISO 400. I almost always shoot manual exposure and flash using an ISO setting of 100.

Pacific Forktail, teneral male.

Pacific Forktail, young/teneral female.

Painted Lady.

Painted Lady.