Pink Dragonfly

[Jay Bernstein]

Canon Rebel xti
Tamron 180mm Macro
ISO 400
F8
1/320 sec
I cropped it about 20%.
Sharpend the wings a bit. You can almost make out an expression on it's face.
Jay

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Jay,
Well......you have a few things working against you on this one....looks like you have a good bit of noise in the BG....either from the crop or ISO....or combo of both. I know these perhes are what they land on....so just a slight tone down there will do the trick but it does appear your focus was a bit off. Yes at that DOF I expect the forward facing wing to be OOF....but with the back wing being that much sharper.....looks like the focus was too much past the body and face and more towards the rear wing. Happens quite a bit in macro if you use AF. I would also suggest you could go with a vert presentation.....putting some room back on the right and getting close to the perch on the left.....so if you do go and revisit this one in PP'ing.....just some things to explore.

[Ken Childs]

Hi Jay, I really don't have anything to add to Roman's comments so I'll just say, keep the bug shots coming. :)

[Jay Bernstein]

Roman/Ken,
I went back and recropped the image vertically and cleaned up the BG, but frankly, there was nothing to be done about the wing OOF. A lesson learned on my part. The AF on the Tamron takes too long so I am going to MF from now on.
I am attaching a slide taken a few frames before where I was experimenting with my flash (Canon Speedlite 430EX).
ISO was at 200 F9 and 1/200/sec.
I almost submitted this one first because I loved how the wings turmned out. But I lost all the color of the reed and the body,added some ack in PS. If i could take the wings and BG from this pic along with the pink body from the first, I may actually have had a good shot. why did the body and reed get so burned yet the wings had stunning detail?
Jay

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Jay,
Could be a number of reasons why that happened....but let's go for my first gut feeling.....did you power the flash down? Your meter probably read the overall scene.....and given the BG.....the output was too high and blew out some of the colors and perch. If you start with minus 1 or so in such situations.....helps a ton. With subjects that have a lot of white.... or bright tones to them....I will generally go to minus 1&2/3....but the metering you use can affect this too. If you use center weighted.....the above suggestions should work pretty well in most cases but I recommed trying this: Take a test image with the flash at those setting on a subject similar to what you are going after in the same light and settings.........then you will be really close in most of the time.....unless an all balck subject pops in! This helps in most cases get you ready before taking the first actual image! BTW....what mode were you in? I always shoot manual.....but the other modes can affect what I just said also! This is the #1 reason we ask you post as much info as you can.....helps us make some pretty specific possible corrections!

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Jay. These are really striking dragonflies that we don't see up north. Roman has really nailed the critiques on both images and has offered some excellent suggestions for you to consider. Keep working on this and keep them coming. :)

[Don Lacy]

HI Jay, In case you were wondering the dragonfly is a male Roseate Skimmer and one of my favorite dragons. In the first image you state you cropped it about 20% does that mean you cropped about 20% of the image and your post represents about 80% of the original frame or you cropped 80% of the image and the post represents 20% of the original frame. If it is the latter and you cropped about 80% of the original then I would advise you against using such heavy crops since the image quality suffers significantly resulting in the excessive noise and poor color fidelity your first post shows. I would be interested in seeing first image without it being cropped since without seeing what you started with it is hard for me to give advice on how to improve it. BTW dragonflies are one of my favorite subjects and I always like to help other capture them.