Hello. My name is Arey, and I have a 940 gal. pond in Coastal So. Jersey. Hopefully, the above picture is of a Dragonfly naiad I photographed last summer using my standard SLR camera and my macro lens. I do have a basic point and click digital camera, but already have so many lenses and filters and attachments for my Canon SLR that I won't buy myself a good diogital camera.

Hi Arey! Welcome to the board!! :)

Nice pic!
Yep, that looks like the guy that is in my pond. Did you find this one in the water or out of the water?

Tia

Nice picture! He's got lots of little color on him like red and green.

I found it in water but out of the pond. My pond isn't that big, but by the middle of summer in So. Jersey the water hyacinths and water lettuce reproduce like crazy, so I got in the habit of removing some regularly and quickly realized I was also removing dragonfly nymphs, tadpoles, aquatic insects toadlets, trapdoor snails from the pond. So I would fill three 20 gallon containers with pond water, and dump pounds of the vegetation into the first container, and swish it around and comb through the roots then throw it into the second container swish it around again and then ito the third container. Fron the third container it went into my compost bin. Last year I didn't put any water hyacinths in the pons because their roots are black and tangled and it's too hard to see if they have anything clinging on for dear life. I only had water lettuce and frogbit to rinse off. When the muck had settled in the bins after the rinsing I would move the pond water from the first to the second bin to the third bin and then into the compost bin carefully watching for tadpoles, toadlets etc.
Any pond life I found I'd return to the pond which is how I found the last nymph last summer.
I know it sounds demented, but I'm retired so have lots of time to do things. I probably look demented while i'm doing it too since all the time I'm playing with water plants, I'm being attacked by greenhead flies, ankle biting flies, biting midges, and mosquitos.

In the movie "The Scent of Green Papaya" there's a scene where a single head of water lettuce is floating in a bowl on a side table. It looked very elegant as opposed to pounds of water lettuce in a 20 gallon utility tub.