I'm sorry to learn that you paid such a heavy price to get this photograph! But the bee and the flower it is on are really nice. If it were mine I think I'd crop it differently, making a more square crop that eliminates much of the branch and the out of focus blossoms to the right. And it would have been better to stop down your lens more when making the exposure, to avoid the shallow DOF that f/5.6 produces. But the bee and the blossoms near it produce a nice image anyway. I look forward to seeing more of your work.
I can see how you would have done it and agree it could be better as per your advice, but at the time I took it and did the PP, this is what I created and I was happy with it.
I did a crop on my first post just before posting it and kind of knew I should have left it well enough alone but was eager to put up a good image for my first post, sure enough as others suggested, it should have had more where I just cropped it. LOL
Michael the fowers are well exposed, I would be tempted to reduce the brightness just a tad. The other thing is to consider precisely what the subject is, your title is honey bee collecting, so if I were taking the image I would definitely have gone in closer, I am not too sure how close you would get with the zoom lens (do you have extensions tubes?). As presented the image is sharp "where it needs to be" but the bit that "needs to be" i.e the subject is a rather small in the frame.
I like it! The flower is just lovely. You captured it's ethereal beauty. All those little anthers (?) are just right. I like the composition and would not change it. The branch creates a strong diagonal and balances the large flower. As for dof, that is always challenging. The f stop you used is just right for the flower. But, maybe a smaller opening might have allowed the bee to be sharper. I think this is a lovely image.
I just read Jonathan's post. He makes some good points. I took your photo into my software, looked at levels, and sure enough, the whites on the main flower are blown, so toning them down a bit would be good.
Last edited by Anita Bower; 05-15-2013 at 04:09 PM.
Hi Michael and welcome to the Macro forum! You captured a nice shot of the bee (they often seem to have their heads buried in the flower) and the flower clump it was working on. Good sharpness within your DOF and good DOF for f/5.6. The diagonal branch makes a strong compositional element. Cropping is subjective and you have several suggestions above to consider. I might suggest cropping a little from the right - just to remove the 3 white petals in the upper right corner - the white draws my eye to that spot and then out of the frame. Overall, this is very nicely done and I look forward to seeing more of your work here in Macro!
Honey Bee Collecting
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