Mating Pioneers

[PRABIR BHATTACHARYYA]

Mating Pioneers shot at Bangalore, India in November, 2009.
Canon 1000D, 55-250mm IS @250mm, 1/200s, f/5.6, ISO-100, Center Weighted Avg, Manual.



Thanks for C&C.

[Julie Kenward]

Nice clarity on the two butterflies, Prabir! I like the amount of negative space you left - it feels just right as far as a crop goes. I do think you could raise it up another notch or two if you cloned out the OOF leaf and yellow circle in the LLC and also toned down the brighter leaf right behind the mating pair.

As far as the angle goes, if you could have moved to the left just a bit, the back BF's face might have shown up a little better - but I know from experience that's not always possible...just something to consider the next time you're out. Getting both BF's even with the camera's sensor can make a huge difference. As it is the front of both BF's are a bit dark - you might try using fill flash next time or try opening up those midtones a bit in pp.

[PRABIR BHATTACHARYYA]

Thanks a lot Julie for the advice.

[Dave Leroy]

Good for you to get both of them together like this. Lots of good suggestions by Jules. I might also remove the bit of stem sticking up on the right side of the leave the two are on.

If mine i would also look at giving the bf a bit more pop, perhaps some vibrancy, or some selective curves or contrast brightening work would do it. The front butterfly is very sharp.

[PRABIR BHATTACHARYYA]

Thanks a lot Dave for the advice.

[Ken Childs]

Hi Prabir, nice behavioral capture! The butterflies look good and sharp and as Jules said, the crop looks just right. In addition to the suggestions given, if this were mine, I'd lighten it way up. If you have Photoshop, the Shadows/Highlights tool would not only lighten it up, it would give more weight to the darker butterfly on the left and should do a good job of evening out the brightness of the overall image. Do that and then boost the contrast and you should end up with a nicely lighted image. Brightening it up will probably bring up more noise so you'll probably need to run NR or add some blur to the BG. It's a good capture and a bit of extra PP work will definitely take this one up a few notches.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Prabir. Nice job of capturing this behavior and you have good sharpness on your subjects. You also have a lot of excellent advice above from Jules, Dave, and Ken so I won't repeat. I think you will find that these tweaks will make your image noticeably stronger. I would wish that the one butterfly's wing wasn't tattered, but there was nothing you could do about that.