Praying Mantis

[Myer Bornstein]

I was re-editing slides this evening and found my pictures of a praying mantis, which is the first I have seen around my Condo. Taken with Nikon D300105mm
157mm (in 35mm film)
1/320 sec, f/9
Mode: Program
Metering: Multi-segment
Exp comp: -1/3
ISO: 200
AF mode: AF-C

[Vida van der Walt]

Hi Myer. Great detail and sharpness on the head of the mantis. I like the turn of the head as well. I wonder what a closer, portrait crop will look like?:)

[Myer Bornstein]

Vida
OK here is a head crop. What do you think? :D

[Vida van der Walt]

Hi Myer. I wish I knew how to get a hold of your image to show you what I mean. You still have a landscape format here and the crop is a bit too big as you are losing IQ. Let me put it this way: if you can envision a vertical line dividing the original image in half, then crop slightly to the left of that halfway line. I hope you have enough pixels for the crop. This is all just a personal opinion though and not a big issue.:)

[Julie Kenward]

Myer, this is such a unique portrait of a PM...it's really beautiful. I love the different colors that are in this image but if you look closely at the greens and the dark blue you'll see there's quite a bit of noise going on. I opened the image in PS and ran a round of noise reduction which helped but still left the darkest colors pretty noisy. I then added a gaussian blur layer at 20 pixels. I went back and masked in the details on the face at 100% and the legs and body at 50% opacity and left the rest of the image blurred - this took out all the noise and left the focus only on the PM's face.

I then did a crop to an 8x10 which knocked off some of the left side as Vida suggested and this further put emphasis on the face. Finally, I added a kick to the midtones, bringing them up to about 1.2 (if I remember right) and did a slight raise in contrast to make the light and dark tones pop.

See what you think...

[Allen Sparks]

great praying mantis close-up. I find these buggers very hard to shoot. Really like the focus on the face in this shot. Also really like Julie's repost.

[Myer Bornstein]

Julie
Thanks I love the repost. You improved the image 1000%. I am just learning all the PS tricks.
Allen. My son found the mantis and it was on the condo's white siding. I got my 105 macro lens and placed the mantis gently on the bushes in front and shot away. had fun doing it
Now the enjoyment is learning how to improve the pictures with PS ;)