Red hot postman

[Randy Stout]

Well, last night a natural light Tree nymph, tonight a flash assisted postman. I did try to preserve more of the ambient illumination here, than in my series last week. I thought the plant it was sitting on rather striking.

D700 70-200 f/2.8 at f/14 ISO 500 1/250 Manual exposure canon 500D
Flash on TTL/ balance with EV at -3.3
Handheld

All comments appreciated. Still working on developing my 'macro aesthetic'

The compression of the jpeg did sap a bit of the bite out of the image.

Cheers

Randy

[Julie Kenward]

Randy this is striking! I love the red leaf...wow! You got a very nice DOF on the butterfly at f14 and still managed to get a decently blurred BG. I don't mind the two smaller areas of dark towards the left frame and lower frame but the one at the top is a bit distracting. You might try setting your clone tool at 30% and "lighten" and see if you can't even that out a bit to the surrounding BG.

I do think you're getting the hang of this!

[Randy Stout]

Jules:

Thanks for the comment. I struggled with the issue of the dark area at top. I worked on it for a while, but didn't like the look of my changes, so went back to the original. I will keep tinkering with it. I think the image is strong enough that it is worth a little more work.

Randy

[denise ippolito]

Randy, I really like the composition and the bending of the leaf I find interesting. Nice details on your butterfly and agree w/ Julie about dark spots. This is a very nice image!

[Dave Mills]

Hey Randy, You captured the subject beautifully. You picked the perfect plane to shoot them at! Same comment regarding the backround...

[Randy Stout]

Thanks everyone for your comments. I thought about the background overnight and did a little tweaking. Did I go too far?

I tried to leave some detail in, and intentionally left the far right dark crescent as a mirror to the wing shape.

Cheers

Randy

[Mike Moats]

Hey randy, really cool image. great details, love the red perch. BG looks great.

[Dave Mills]

Hey Randy, Did a superb job fixing the backround. The crescent on the right is fine. Very nice image!!

[denise ippolito]

Randy, Really nice re-post. Your Bg looks natural!!

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

Nice repost Randy. I saw you worked on that dark patch I wanted to mention on top, yet left the one on the RHS? Just wonder why you would not mend that one too?

I love the sharpness and colors. You are right, that petal looks very special as perch. Congrats!

[Julie Kenward]

Excellent repost, Randy! Now the butterfly and the perch get the viewer's whole attention...nicely done! Want to share with everyone what / how you did it so they can try it on a similar image?

[Kaushik Balakumar]

Neat composition. Nice sharpness & details. A bit of harsh contrast in the image.
The re-post is a very good improvement over the original IMO w.r.t the BG.

[Randy Stout]

Jules:

I use Nikon NX2 for most of my post. To eliminate the dark areas, I used the following sequence.

New step
Lasso tool +
Selected the dark areas
Adjustment step - Colorise
Color picker - chose the color off the background that I wanted the dark area to match

Fill select
Adjust opacity to taste

Done.

It takes a little fiddling to get the effect you want. I am still not 100% happy with the top dark area fix.

Kaushik - I appreciate the comment about the harshness. Sometimes in trying to make the subject pop, I push too hard on sharpness and contrast. It also is a bit unpredictable for me when converting to jpeg and downsizing for web. I will take a look at it tonight, and see if I can tweak the contrast/harshness a bit.

Randy

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Randy,
Late to the party..... the repost does look better but there are a few things I want to comment on that you may want to work on......you chose the pose wisely and the BG was actually pretty decent......keep in mind that the BG.......distance and subject is just as important as the subject. Wings closed........f14 fine......you may have even been able to get away with f8! I would add a bit more light to the eye.......and this is the basic flaw of a 1 flash system......unless you get it off shoe. Extremely tough in these situations........hand held (which you did) impossible...unless you have an assistant. A few things you can do........I may have bumped the ISO to 800 (I hear the 700 is VG) to allow for more ambient light and even further minimize it's impact. I love my twin lights but you do have to be very careful with them as it can look overdone......but if you are looking to upgrade......only way to go!
I commented on this B4 your natural light one.....but combo's of flash and natural light....seem to work best for me with windy or moving subjects. Compositionally....you are crushing them!