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 ----
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
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. :)
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!
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.
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?
Rainy morning moth
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