The photographer is looking for thoughtful feedback on the image as a whole, especially around the areas noted below.
Feedback Focus: Artistic + Technical
About This Image
The four wings of the damselflies open and close rapidly, and it’s interesting to try and capture some of this movement. I ran some stacks on this one, trying different angles, as it obliged by shifting its position quite often.
Feedback Requested
Do you prefer the color or B & W version? It was difficult to get the overlapping parts of the dark wings inside the left end of the histogram. I used flash and lightened the wings in post before stacking, but I’m not sure if the color version works.
Processing software: LR to lighten wings PS for tonal adjustments
Major adjustments: Image 2: High Contrast filter in Nik Silver Efex Pro
Blending/stacking: 4 shots in Zerene
Other notes: Denoise and cropping
I like this a lot, Mike. For me, the colors are so lovely and add to our understanding of what we are seeing, so I’m on team color for this one. I’ll be curious to see what others think.
ML
Very interesting experiment, Mike, to try to get the motion of the wings, which I think you did a very good job of accomplishing. For me I prefer the color as well.
Mike, this is a great (and fun!) capture where the color is much better than the B&W. Amazing that the damsel held it’s abdomen that still during the capture, it’s perfectly sharp. the moire pattern near the wing bases is good fun also. If you’re thinking about a print, I’d suggest burning-in the lower section of the leaf.
A very cool job on this one, Mike. It worked very well. I do like the color and probably prefer it, but only marginally as I find the B&W with its old fashioned “illustration” look fascinating as well.
Great fun and a cool result!! I prefer the color version too but I could see the leaf being darker and the BG behind the leaf simplified. You can do adjustments to raw files before sending them to Zerene (where they are converted to TIFFs) – just keep the adjustments as identical as possible. (Shooting in M mode helps.)
As to @Diane_Miller comment on keeping changes as identical as possible, it’s pretty easy if you’re using LR to adjust a single frame and then highlight it with all the rest and click on synchronize. If you use the color adjustment tool to darken the greens it should come through without affecting the critter so all the wing positions look the same (maybe!).
@Mark_Seaver@Marylynne_Diggs@Dennis_Plank@Huw_Thomas@Diane_Miller@arnaud@Shirley_Freeman@Bill_Fach - Many thanks for your comments and tips. The best result would be perhaps with a directly frontal shot taken with a broad pale BG. Will try this perhaps, using Shutter Priority, but rain is coming! I tried M mode,
but got the settings all wrong, so thought a stack would be easier (though focus here is an issue of course).
@Mark_Seaver - the abdomen and head moved, so I had to do some retouching in Zerene. Agreed about the paler section of leaf; originally it was very bright.
An interesting take on using stacking software for multiple exposure photography. Overall, the final image is over-exposed by a third to a single stop. So, either reduce exposure or brightness in post processing. Also, you may want to try to reduce the saturation of green and yellow. I do find that the BW version has very interesting textures and I might throw that one ahead of the color version. Awesome…Jim
