The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Dean Salman’s excellent photo of a Fiery Skipper inspired me to dive into my archives. Here is a fiery skipper in flight, also captured in Arizona.
Skippers can be exasperating. There are so many species. And sometimes I think they should be called RLBBs, or really little brown butterflies. The Fiery Skipper is an exception because it is actually pretty good looking.
OM Systems OM-1 Mark II, post-processing in Affinity Photo 2.
Specific Feedback
I’m interested in all your comments.
Technical Details
Sorry, but the upload function still isn’t working for me. I’ve tried two different Apple computers and three different browsers. No luck.
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Russ, this is a good catch on this Fiery having just taken off (landing gear not retracted). It is nicely separated from the background even as the surroundings show off where these little ones like to hang out. When I look at the large view, I see considerable haloing along the top wing, beneath the front wing, along both antennae and below the eye. Such halos are very often the result of pushing Lightroom’s clarity slider too far. (Other software calls this adjustment, microcontrast enhancement). I’m pretty sure you find these halo’s gone if you go back to the raw file.
Thanks for your excellent comments. I think I got careless when it came time to sharpen this image. I use Affinity Photo 2, but the fault is mine, not the program’s.
Russ: What @Dennis_Plank said regarding the difficulty. My only suggestion to improve the aesthetics of the shot would be to crop much tighter. The light twig across the top is an especially bothersome eye magnet. >=))>
As always, I really appreciate your thoughtful comments. I’ve been learning so much from NPN!
These days, I’ve been concentrating exclusively on insects in flight, specifically damselflies, dragonflies, and butterflies. I find this kind of photography very difficult. The animals are so fast and erratic—it’s really hard to get them into the field of view. This reality compels me to use a relatively small amount of magnification. In turn the image of the animal on the sensor is pretty small. I need to crop almost all my images, sometimes a lot. I’m surprised by how much I can crop with the OM-1, but there are certainly limits. In the case of the Fiery Skipper, I was concerned I might have been pushing the limits.
A quick side note. The Fiery Skipper has two lines of defense from predation. The first is embedding himself in thick vegetation, and the second is an extremely erratic pattern of flight. The low aspect ratio of his wings and the short length of his abdomen enable some crazy maneuvering.
