I climbed up on a chair, adjusted my flash (with homemade diffuser box!) and began the task of focusing wide open, closing the aperture ring and shooting. Lather, rinse and repeat a few times, cull the out-of-focus images (of which there were a lot!) and clean up the dust spots on the few remaining good ones.
Surprisingly I was able to get my unwieldy camera, reversed lens and flash/box combo really close to the dragonfly without it barely flinching. I thought just my presence and the diffuser box looming over the insect would be enough to scare it but it stayed calm, even with the flash firing off just directly above it. Only when I decided to climb off the chair to try and recompose my shots did it decide to fly away.
I tried my best to get the eyes in focus as that's what you're usually drawn to in the first place, but if you've ever used a reverse Nikon lens set-up you'll know how difficult it is to get the incredibly shallow focus plane just right AND THEN close the aperture to near-darkness to increase sharpness and focus plane. Add to that hand-holding the camera with a top-heavy flash and it made for a pretty testing time. That said it was really fun, despite the arm-aching weight of the camera and googly eyes I got from peering into the dark viewfinder :)
