Silver-studded Blue

[Jerry van Dijk]

I'm working through some old images and came across this one from a Silver-studded Blue. I'm not sure about the crop I chose. I didn't like an exact square crop, so this one is slightly off. Not sure if that works. Any feedback on that would be very welcome! This crop is from a larger 2x3 frame, so I have much room to try any other crops.
Nikon D7000, 200mm Micro, handheld, ISO-250, f/13, 1/250s, -0.3EV. Minor PP in ACR.

[Jonathan Ashton]

I like the crop shape but would suggest a little looser. The butterfly appears to be in sharp focus but is not quite showing the detail I would have expected, maybe a little toning down of the highlights would help.

[Jerry van Dijk]

Thanks Jonathan! I'm a bit puzzled with those details. Details seem to be especially lacking on the edges of the wing. In the original, I can count the indiviual shales on the wing itself and all the hairs on the body, so some of the detail may have been lost due to the compression needed for posting (saved at 93% if I remember correctly). But details are lacking on the edge of the wings in the original image too. The edge of the wings looks blown, which would explain the lack of detail, but my blinkies in PS tell me that they aren't blown and toning them down does not lead to recovery of any details. My suspicion is that with the shallow DOF here (which I needed because of the windy conditions), the wing edges are just out of the plane of focus, or that those hairs were in motion because of the wind.

[Nancy Bell]

An alternate crop could be a vertical with more added to the bottom since that is the direction the butterfly is facing. I find the OOF bright pink flowers distracting from the butterfly. Since they are brighter than the butterfly my eyes go to them right away.

[John Robinson]

I have to aggree with Nancy about the flowers being eye catching a little too much.( Didn't want to stick my neck out !!)Dakening the wings does bring a little more detail out. F13 should have been ok as its in plane with the camera enough, so its probably movement.

Cheers
John

[Jerry van Dijk]

Thanks Nancy and John, I totally agree with you on the perch. The biggest problem I have with it is that it is largely OOF. The perch is actually one of the species' host plants, and this butterfly is very rare in the Netherlands (especially around where I live), so I couldn't bring myself to bin it....

[Steve Maxson]

The crop works for me, Jerry. Good points already discussed above. I might add that increasing your ISO would have gotten you to f/16 and a little more DOF, but probably not enough to get all of the flower head in focus. I think the image would be stronger if the front portion of the flower head was sharp, but I also think you were in a difficult situation trying to get both the butterfly and flower within a limited DOF. :S3: