The photo on the left shows a Widow Skimmer (top) and Great Blue Skimmer resting on a piece of reed on the pond's edge. (The male Widow Skimmer is recognizable by its white bands part way along the wings - the female lacks these bands). Widow Skimmer (Top) and Great Blue Skimmer Resting (1/320, f11)

Dragonflies are creatures of habit. Most of their time is taken up with patrolling their piece of the lake edge from any other dragonflies. Typically, they would patrol a strip about 40 feet wide. However, they would need to rest quite frequently because of the heat, and they would invariably rest at the same two or three resting spots. All I had to do was wait for the dragonfly to arrive at its resting spot, quickly focus, adjust the  polarizer, and take the photo.

Here's a close-up of the Widow Skimmer. They would only rest for a few seconds usually, so I had to work fast to capture these images. Focusing turned out to be the biggest challenge; I ended up discarding about 60% of the photos taken because focusing wasn't quite right.

The photo below shows a male and female Great Blue Skimmer mating - quite interesting! That's the thing with macro nature photography, one often sees aspects of nature that one wouldn't normally notice. Its a beautiful thing to be able to capture in image form.