Dragonfly

What technical feedback would you like if any? Any

What artistic feedback would you like if any? Any Canon 5dmkIII, 180 Macro lens, 1/200sec, iso 1250 at f 5.

Pertinent technical details or techniques: Used noise reduction software.

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John Wayne. I really like the angle that you captured hm. Good lighting on him and his perch. I am wondering if you cropped this, because it seems this close in with that 180mm you would have had more details in the eyes. It is in focus, but either a large crop, using f5, or the noise reduction lost some of the detail in the eyes, I am thinking. I love the position he is in, and how he is holding his wings.

Great photo image John Wayne, it is a nice example of the head shot. at 1/200 sec I suspect a tripod was used but not sure. @Shirley_Freeman, I need to understand the large crop factor. I know it exist but I am confused about it. Any thoughts?

Thanks Shirley, I thought the iso 1200 might have been the noise problem with this shot but yes the large crop surely increased noise. Using Topaz did lose detail in the eyes because I checked with the original photo which had more detail. I might try focus stacking shortly to bring more of the subject in focus. Yes, I’m not good at handheld shots so a tripod is a must for me.

Dean, thanks for the comment. You prompted me to read up on the “crop factor” and I’m still confused on the necessity of understanding all the numbers . I have a full frame camera Canon 5ds-r with 3.2 crop factor . All I know is, the larger the crop, depending on f stop and iso, affects the occurrence of noise. Please take this with a grain of salt for my formal training in photography is limited.
Wayne

The more you crop an image the less resolution the image has (not as many pixels.) Had you been close enough to the subject to get that full frame the resolution would be much greater and you would see all the facets in those eyes. The noise when cropping an image in post is enlarged as well so when DeNoise is used it will blur those pixels also increasing the softness of the eyes. Hope that explains what Shirley was referring to.

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Thanks Kelly, good reminder for me to heed.
Wayne

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Wayne, this is a good head on view of the dragonfly, with nice colors in the eyes. The mix of depth-of-field and lack of detail in the eyes shows that it’s a large crop. It also looks like you’ve pushed the contrast and/or saturation. Because your camera is a full frame sensor, your crop factor is one, which means that there’s no magnification due to the camera only using part of the image that the lens provides.

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Nice angle on a good subject. You might be able to re-process with some improvement. The crop factor of the camera isn’t relevant. What matters is how much you crop the originally captured frame, as you lose pixels, thus losing resolution and detail. With the sharpest capture you can crop a lot. Noise is worse if you have to bring up exposure, so keeping it high without blowing highlights is helpful. Lowering exposure in raw is good, raising it can cause noise to show up. A dragonfly is so small that you may need f/16 to get even basic depth of field. The farther from the subject you are (smaller in the frame) the better the DOF so cropping will give some free DOF. That camera should give you very good results.

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Thanks to all for taking the time to review and comment. All suggestions are welcomed.
Wayne