Ian, I think the majority of the bee is nicely sharpened but the legs feel very oversharpened to me. I'd mask off part of the sharpening there and take it back down a notch.
Nice in flight image. As Art said less BG would have been nice but you did a great job of freezing the speed of the bee. The trick now is to figure out minimum ss so you can lower that aperture a bit and get the best of both worlds. ;)
Hey Ian,
Agree with a bit over sharpened.....but fantastic flight capture with excellent light. I do agree on running NR......so just keep that in mind when re-working this.
OK, I'll go back and work on it some more. I did one pass with noiseware pro on the BG, but I can go back and add some more. I'll also see if I can tone done the sharpness on the legs . Thanks.
As for lighting, I used to use a Lumiquest Softbox routinely on my macros. Although I've been happy with the lighting from the Lumiquest, the thing is clumsy and keeps falling off my flash. When I was out at the botanical garden this weekend shooting birds with my Better Beamer, I got the idea to glue a couple of pieces of velcro onto some translucent plastic (I used a white plastic food-chopping sheet I bought at Target which is similar in opacity but stiffer than the Lumiquest) and substituting it for the lens on the front of the BB. It seems to work very similarly to the Lumiquest, but is much more rigid and sturdier. I made the sheet a bit taller than the lens so if there was stray light it would still be diffused. Interestingly, the sheet comes in a package of about a half-dozen different colors (<$10 US) -- I'm going to cut up the other colors too so I can have some colored diffusers. An added advantage is that less room in my bag is now taken up -- the plastic diffuser sheets are thin and I no longer need to pack the lumiquest.