Taken late this morning in my garden. At this point in the season the peonies in my garden are in all stages of bloom from just beginning to bud (bottom left background) to going to seed (top right background).
Peonies are a hive of activity for ants. They attract ants by secreting a nectar which the ants eat and in return the ants protect the blossoms from floral feeding insects. By my observation, the ants spend ~10-15 seconds on a blossom before running back down the stem. A short while later a colleague will return for another short stint. Quite fun to watch.
Specific Feedback Requested
I have trouble getting razor sharp macro images of insects. I’m not unhappy with this shot but the sharpness on the ant isn’t great if you really zoom in.
Any tips on that are appreciated but I’m also happy to receive any other feedback you have. Thanks!
Technical Details
Shot with a Canon EOS 80D / EF-S55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS STM
ISO 200, 121 mm, 1/800 sec, f/9.0
Edited in Lightroom to add the vignette and increase the sharpness on the ant.
I remember this from my mom’s garden - people don’t think of ants as pollinators, but they are. I like the dark tonality overall, but wonder if the pink could be taken down a notch to match the saturation of the greens which seem more subdued. A think which can help to improve sharpness is to pre-focus on an area where the ant will travel and hit the shutter when it arrives. You could easily crop the lower flower out as it’s kind of an eye magnet with the ant being so small in the frame.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback Kristen, it all makes good sense to me. I’ve updated the post with adjustments to the crop and the saturation of the bloom.
While the original is interesting for comparing the blooms, I definitely lean towards the crop for exactly the reasons that @Kris_Smith pointed out; the repost looks great.
The ant looks pretty sharp to me. To clarify, are your issues getting the insect in focus, or that the image just isn’t sharp enough even when the insect is in focus as much as possible?
Have you taken test images on a still subject in controlled conditions to find at what aperture your lens is the sharpest? I do that with my lenses, and find the difference can be quite significant; it’s nice to know where the sweet spot is and what apertures produce “acceptable” sharpness.
With that said, when I looked at this in Photoshop the ant’s right legs and the back end of the abdomen are plugged in the green channel. My memory is that 60% of the detail comes from the green channel, so that might hurt those areas? Then again, I’m not an expert at all and that might be hogwash.
I am mostly happy with the sharpness of the ant’s lines (excepting the rear right legs and abdomen) but I would’ve loved to see greater definition on the head, thorax and abdomen – I feel like their texture is muddy.
I haven’t gone through the exercise of taking controlled images on a still subject to find my lens’ sharpest aperture - thanks for that tip, I will definitely do that.
That’s an interesting point about the green channel. I’m quite a novice when it comes to photo analysis and processing in Photoshop and I’m not sure I understand what you mean about being “plugged in the green channel”. Are you referring to the bunched up green histogram when selecting the abdomen and right legs?
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts & ideas, I really appreciate it.
In the rgb colorspace, Photoshop represents more of a color by making it brighter in the channel, and the darker the channel is the less of the color there is. The camera records color the way our eye does; 60% is from green, 30% is from red, and 10% is from blue. (If you look at rgb channels of images in Photoshop, you’ll often note that the blue channel is less sharp or has more noise than the other two because of this.)
In the green channel, the flower under the ant is so magenta in color that it has no green; it is black, or “plugged.” (Photographers often talk about “plugged” when a color channel is all black and “blown” when it is all white.) When that happens, that color channel is not contributing to detail in the image. Here, the black of the flower in the green channel blends with the black of the ant (black by definition has no color in rgb). My expertise is limited, so take all this with a grain of salt, but those areas might have more detail if the plugged area of the green channel instead had more definition. (The red channel, which looks great for detail here, often contributes enough detail to cover the loss of detail in the green and so unplugging the green channel might not make a big difference. But, if the detail is recoverable in raw it would be fun to compare.)
