Rainy morning moth

[pat lillich]

saw this moth tucked back in a rose - at first it was totally encased in droplets, but the next time I checked on it, it had used its tongue to start cleaning off.

I wasn't having any luck with the flash lighting it - and didn't get great depth of field. so i copied the center of its face off of one shot and layered it on a second one.

not sure what the crop should be, this crop doesn't clip any bits and pieces ----

d300, 105mm f2.8, 1/125 sec at f/16, manual, nikon sb-900 flash, handheld.

cropped and added a quarter of a stop of exposure in LR, plus a little clarity
in PS used NIK filter to darken the edges a little, noise reduction and sharpening and painted out some oof highlights in background

appreciate any suggestions on how to improve!

[pat lillich]

or is this a better crop - it gets rid of that distracting droplet on the bottom right but it crops the legs unevenly.

I find composition really difficult...

[Leon Robinson Jr.]

The detail is Excellent!

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Pat. From this angle, your critter looks like one of the skippers (a type of butterfly) rather than a moth. :) I love all the water droplets and the smooth gold tones in the background. Nice job compositing (is that a word?) the face to get more DOF. I like the crop on the OP more than that of the repost because it shows the edge of the petal and helps give a feel for the location of the skipper. Having said that, I would wish that the petal wasn't just touching the bottom of the frame - maybe add a sliver of canvas at the bottom. Also, you might try lightening that dark area at the bottom as it tends to draw my eye. :)

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Pat,
Good idea on the composite! I think Steve gave you some great advice and I too prefer the OP crop. The water drops add a lot to the overall appeal!

[Ken Childs]

Hey Pat, it looks like Steve has the critique covered pretty well! All I can add it that you might try to selectively sharpen the club on the right antenna.

And yes, this is definitely a Skipper. :)

[pat lillich]

thank you everyone, Skipper it is. I looked up pictures on google and recognized the most common butterfly I've been seeing in the garden. I had a simplistic idea that moths were furry and butterflies were not.

I didn't have any more canvas at the bottom so I used a combination of content aware scale and cloning to try to add a little. discovered that I definitely should have been working on the original - in this little jpg the content aware scale added strange lines that I had to repair.
lightened the dark under the petal a little and tried some sharpening on the right antenna. Interesting - smart sharpening seemed more effective in this case than multiple applications of unsharp mask. I need to go re-read the information about unsharp mask. Hoping this is a bit better?

thank you all for your help!

[Steve Maxson]

Good job on the repost - this is clearly an improvement. :)

[Cheryl Flory]

great job on getting the details and on the composition. I prefer the first crop.