Beautiful Dragonfly

The title says it all.  Dragonflies are a oxymoronic blend of beauty and ugly. They eat mosquitoes, flies, ants, bees and wasps, so they are useful predators. They are found around water because they go through a stage as an aquatic nymph. There are a lot of them down at the river. Some mornings, once the sun warms them up or dries their wings, they fly out onto the river in wave after wave like an army invasion. They particularly like to land on vertical stems like this one and preferably near the top.

At this close range, depth of field is measured in millimeters. Even though I had the camera set at f/8, the wings on the right are already out of focus. It is better that the further wings be out of focus rather than the nearer. It is not as distracting to the eye.