The photographer is looking for thoughtful feedback on the image as a whole, especially around the areas noted below.
Feedback Focus: Artistic / Expressive
About This Image
I found this Aster and BumbleBee while walking back to my truck after a Saturday morning walk in the woods a few weeks ago. It was still pretty chilly in the mountains south of Bozeman Montana so this BumbleBee was docile enough to attempt a focus stacked macro shot. I had to stop one stack halfway through after fly landed and made the Bee move a bit. Attempt two worked well and this is the result. I just love the close up details, included a reflection of the flower itself and the background forest in its eye.
Feedback Requested
Do the small areas of halo in a few areas detract? I have retouched as much as I could in Helicon and then used the remove tool in Lightroom for a couple of areas too.
Technical Details
Nikon Z8
Sigma 105mm Macro with FTZ2 adapter
ISO 400, f/10, 1/125th
40 images stacked in Helicon Focus and processed in Lightroom Classic CC
This is gorgeous. I’ve been doing bees lately, but no chance of a stack! Maybe I should wake up earlier. If you have halos, then I wouldn’t worry too much, unless everyone else finds them, because I can’t. My only suggestion would be to remove the vignette, as I don’t think it adds to an already beautiful shot. That’s just personal taste, however.
Excellent, Paul. Amazing to do a focus stack on a bee. Excellent detail and overall composition. Love the clean background; really makes the bee and flower shine.
Stack looks clean to me. Centered/off-center arrangement works well to tell the story of a resting bee. They often can be found on flowers having not made it back to the nest the night before. Once I had a little girl in my garden for two nights running so on the third morning, I gently coaxed her onto a transport device so I could get her to a flower in the sun. She flew off.
The vignette is a tad strong, but like Mike said, it’s a personal taste thing. The colors and shadows look right to me and I like the shiny eye looking right at us. Amazing there wasn’t a breeze to ruin the stack. Asters are notoriously unsteady. Bravo.
I’m not seeing any artifacts that I would consider a problem, Paul. A beautiful job. Early morning bumblebees are pretty stable. I’ve even caught a couple that spent the night on a flower and had dew on them. I like the straightforward composition with just the flower and bee all in such nice crisp focus. Very well done.
I think it’s quite impressive to do a stack on a living creature such as a bee. It’s very interesting. I’ve never tried this, but I have been taking a lot of pictures of bees lately. I guess one has to be somewhat lucky when trying this because any movement will really be difficult to resolve.
Paul, this is a great look at this bee and the aster. Stacking lets all the details show very well. The background colors add a nice sense of warmth. I don’t see any halos. I do see a couple of spots where stacking cannot overcome the laws of optics. (When you have overlapped sharp areas, there must be an oof “halo” unless you have the dof to get both areas sharp in a single frame.) You can “fix” the problem areas with some very fine tuned cloning.
Paul: Wonderful color palette on the flower and BG with terrific detail. I may have asked you before but if you have auto-stacking with your camera how quickly does it acquire the captures? My camera has to be focused manually but I’m contemplating upgrading and would appreciate any insights from folks who can do this. >=))>
Thanks @Bill_Fach My camera does what NIkon calls “focus shift”. You have to be in auto focus mode, then choose the nearest point you want in focus. It can be tough to pay attention to elements in the image that angle back toward the camera, so I usually make sure the nearest thing I want in focus is, then turn the ring to focus a little in front of that. It will capture the images as fast as the shutter speed allows and will take the shots with very little time between images. There is also a setting for the amount of focus travel between shots. I keep this pretty small and usually use a pretty large aperture to get a super soft background. In this case I used f/10 to try to ensure I got the images I needed before the bee moved! I was right at the minimum focus distance, so even at F/10, the depth of field is tiny when you’re right up on the flower!
Bill. Sony’s focus stacking works the same way as Paul’s Nikon. You can put frame rate at high and rattle them off at whatever the camera can handle (30 frames/second or more on most of the newer cameras).
Paul–result looks quite good with minimal halos present. The OOF petal behind the bee’s antennae would be a tough edit to remove. Stack looks good and overall image quality is excellent. If so desired, you could lessen the presence of the vignette. It does pull my eyes up into the corners. The eye of the bumblebee is excellent with lots of details in the highlights…Jim
The bit of OOF halo behind the antenna looks easy to fix, since it is lighter than the BG and the antenna is darker than both. Set the clone tool to Darken mode and carefully clone over the halo from the adjacent green. That will give basically pixel-level cloning.
Congrats on the EP, Paul! How nice of the bee to cooperate with you and ignoring that pesky fly:)The purple against the green is perfect and really enhance the bee. Terrific image!!
