The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
The wood was so soft, that it crumbled immediately when I touched it. Thousands of little fungi, no more than a few millimeters long, were decomposing it and gave the nutrients back to the soil.
I found it difficult to capture the beauty. I decided finally, to record only this part (less than an inch) and to use two images for a small stack, to get a little more DOF with a large aperture.
Specific Feedback
Do/don’t you like the choice of the sharp/unsharp parts?
All other comments welcome as well.
Very cool! I love finding these guys, but it’s not a fungi, it’s a slime mold. Slime molds are individual single-celled organisms that come together when there is a food source. They signal each other when food is discovered and they come together like this to set up fruiting bodies that release spores just like fungi does. What you have here are those fruiting bodies. Fascinating little creatures.
Anyway…from experience I know how hard it is to compose this kind of thing and I like the arrangement you have with the contrasting soft green. The areas of sharpness are good and I think having a lot of blur is fine, but the two images you stacked don’t align and there are gaps in the focus plane that look strange if you know to look for them. Almost no one else would notice, so I don’t think it’s a deal breaker. The orange is so vivid and I like the catch lights you have in many of the in focus “luftballons”. Thanks for posting. I love these weird little critters.
Thank you Kristen for your comment, and especially for the information about slime molds. I didn’t know about them, and first thing I’ll do is look for more info on the internet.
As you are fascinated by mushrooms, fungi etc, I am fascinated by dead wood. The structures, colour, the decay… Small eco systems in itself. So I found the slime molds by chance, my first interest was the wood.
You are definitely right about the bad stack, the 2 images weren’t meant to be stacked but I shot several different focal planes to sort out later what looked best. Finally I thought that the stack of these 2 would be better than a single image. The most conspicuous bad spot, for me, is the left “front” end of the wood that has several strange gaps. I sometimes try to cover up things a bit, by cloning suitable parts over the worst spots, to make them stand out less.
Something like this. Bad practice, probably.
Han, I am not familiar with the slime molds either, so I appreciate @Kris_Smith providing the information. I also haven’t begun to stack images, so kudos to you for making that effort! It sounds like Kris provided some really good info on that aspect of it too. I like your second post much better. Is it a rework of the first? If so, you can edit the title (by clicking on the pencil next to the title) and adding “rework”, “edit” or something like that to let folks know that you have made some changes of the original post. Thank you for sharing. I can see where you could have an interest in old wood. Looking forward to more shots.
Very cool! The imperfections in the focus stacking weren’t obvious at all to me. Even after reading Kris’s comment, I can’t see the “bad” spots. I like the focus level.
Kris is right about the stack as well as her ID on the slime (admittedly I don’t have any meaningful experience in that field like Kris does).
Although there are very minor areas that can be noticed if you look really close and if you know what to look for in the stack, I appreciate it for what it is as a whole.
It is a good idea to form some sort of best practice routine in stacking for consistency purposes.
I like the DOF, the colors, the lighting and the overall composition!
It’s a very pleasant slice of nature!
I see that you used f/3.5, I suggest trying a smaller aperture opening like f/8 or f11 since you used a tripod, that would produce more focus depth in just one image. That may require a SS of 1/4s or maybe bump the ISO up to 800 if there were movement concerns involved.
Just a thought
Thank you, @Shirley_Freeman , @Bonnie_Lampley and @Merv for your comments! @Shirley_Freeman : in the 2nd post I clone-stamped a bit over the most (in my opinion) conspicuous unsharp spot in the wood. That’s the only difference. It doesn’t make up for a bad focus stack, but it makes it less obvious.
Another recent image with dead wood you can find in the flora section (the “Color contrast” image), but it is very different and not a close-up.
I made images with a much smaller aperture as well, but I don’t like the BG in that case.
Nice, Han. I can see the issues with the focus stack, but the subject is so interesting and the orange fruiting bodies so dominant in the composition that it’s not a major problem. Very, very cool image.
