falkor Comments placed and received

Very nice. The apple especially looks so realistic.
not sure but perhaps the orange looks a little flat.

This would have been hard to catch, they fly so fast.

Might I suggest that you crop the image a bit. Think of the rule of thirds and get rid of most of the background. Then I think this image would look even better.

Looking better already.

He's very cute.
I think the only thing missing is a bright twinkle in the eye.

A good effort, though I think you are good enough to improve this dragon fly a lot.
If you have a look at some reference images (sxc has 424 dragonfly pictures) you can see that the tops of the legs are positioned much closer together, and the tails are split into several segments.
Perhaps if you also made the background green instead of red and positioned the dragonfly on a stick it would look even better.
All the best.

I was just looking at the sketchup plugins page (http://sketchup.google.com/download/plugins.html), you should have a look at the photorealistic renderers.
I'm not sure how easy they are to use but Kerkythea looks like it's completely free and Podium and Indigo Renderer seem to have a limited free version.

Keep up the good effort.

well done Phil! A great invention that doesn't even block your view of the tv.