I was told this one looks like a clown face. "You have a funny face. You should be a clown." I heard that comment, as told to my friend several years ago. "This guy even has a green rubber nose..."

I spent some time, today, at Jamie's Pond Wildlife Management Area in Hollowell, Maine, USA, just outside of Augusta. This site has always had opportunities for close insect face macros. I try to build up a good working relationship with the insects by first imaging them at lower magnification and at farther distances. As the insect starts to feel comfortable with my presence, I slowly increase the magnification and decrease the working distance. When I made this image I was down to a working distance of about 5-6 inches. This particular Dragonfly became so comfortable with me and would see an insect fly by, fly off to catch it, and return to the same spot a few seconds later. This is a 2:1(twice life-size), at the sensor, macro image. For this image, I used my manual focus Tamron Adaptall-2 Model 52BB SP 90mm f2.5 Macro Lens and Tamron Adaptall-2 18f 1:1 Tube and Tamron Adaptall-2 01f 2X Flat Field Teleconverter with attached Tamron Adaptall-2 Pentax K A Mount, all mounted to Pentax K20D Camera, hand held, manually focused by moving the entire assembly back and forth, Shake Reduction set to 200mm, ISO 400, f8 on lens, 1/90 sec, with fill-in flash from camera's built-in electronic flash. This is a Full Resolution Large JPEG and is Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC) and is without any post-processing, editing, adjustment, cropping, or re-sizing.

There is good face and compound eye detail visible in the Original Size.