Ahh, the lovely days of summer bring with them, blooms and bugs galore.  Here in the Pacific Northwest, we are lucky as we don’t have too many bugs like they do down south.  We are lucky too in that we have some gorgeous winged creatures that include this beautiful red dragonfly.  This little, er big one, is called a flame skimmer.  I captured her (the girls have yellow veins on their wings) at the Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon https://lansugarden.org/  I love August in the garden just watching the dragonflies chase each other in a flight of acrobatic dance.  They also are not camera shy sitting on flowers for minutes at a time posing for me.  A favorite part of photography (or one of them) is chasing light.  Morning sun or afternoon sun is my favorite time to shoot.  The morning light gives you cool tones with cool shadows.  The afternoon sun brings warm light with long shadows. You can see the afternoon light here shining on her back and throwing its light through the wing casting a  winged shadow onto the flower bud – so cool for this red dragonfly.  Some fun facts about dragonflies – they are found on every continent except Antarctica.  They live near water because their larvae need water to survive.  They like ponds, lakes, and streams with lots of vegetation to hide from predators. They spend the majority of their lives as larvae and only live as adults for a few weeks, just long enough to mate and reproduce.  Finally, there are over 7,000 species of dragonflies in the world!

Red dragon fly sitting on pink lotus bud with sun casting detailed red shadow of wing across flower bud.