Feeding Green Bottle Fly

[Iain Barker]

I think this is my best attempt at macro so far. Taken in my garden this weekend.
The image is totally unprocessed apart from slight sharpening as I am unsure how to improve it. It is just as straight export from Lightroom.

Nikon D7000 Sigma 105mm f2.8 macro. 1/160 sec f9.0 ISO 200

I look forward to any comments and critique.

[Mitch Haimov]

Looks like you nailed the focus on this one, Iain. Good sharpness on your subject, and I like that the center of the flower is also within your DOF. I agree that this is better done than your prior thread in this forum. The light is soft, but I think I would prefer either diffused light or fill flash at low output.

[Diane Miller]

Very nice! You might think about darkening and lowering saturation on the pink OOF area on the left, and maybe also the green areas in the BG. There might be more detail in the fly that could be brought out, possibly by using Nik's Detail Extractor and then masking the effect just to the fly.

[Iain Barker]

Mitch the picture was taken late morning on a sunny day and I agree more defuse light would be better. I have not really tried flash with macro so will give it a go.
Diane I will try your suggestions. I can see that toning the background colours will stop them being as distracting. I don't have Nik's detail extractor are there any simple techniques in standard photoshop or lightroom to extract more detail in the fly?

[Diane Miller]

You could do a lot by lightening the fly's body with a Curves layer, masked to just the fly. You can do a similar thing in LR with the adjustment brush but it's much easier to control the mask shape precisely in PS, and with it you can tweak the mask after the fact with further painting, as it will reside on an adjustment layer that you won't flatten in the master file. You can also use the Shadows-Highlights adjustment. Use it on a copy of the BG layer as it may also need to be masked to certain parts of the image. Detail Extractor is extremely powerful and more subtle than either of these.

Here's a tutorial I wrote on the Quick Mask method: http://www.adorama.com/alc/0008106/article/Virtual-fill-flash

[Mitch Carucci]

That fly is sharp! We have the same fly here and they are small. You did a great job on this image...(Love the mettalic green). Well done...

[Jonathan Ashton]

I an this is a fine shot. For me it all fits together so well, I like the shape and composition, the colours and the position of the greenbottle. The aperture was well chose rendering the fly nicely isolated. I have a had a good look and I really can't see anything I would wish to change.

[Iain Barker]

Thanks for the comments everyone.