Hover Fly doing its thing on a flower taken in my backyard.
Taken with Fuji X-T30 with 50-230mm lens with Nikon 5T diopter handheld. Looking for any technical and artistic advise.
Shawn this is a pretty nice capture of a tiny little Hoverfly, especially considering it was taken handheld. I love how the yellows on him coordinate nicely with the yellow of the flower. The pano composition works nicely to include all of the flower. If I was to do anything to improve this, I think I would clone or darken the leaf in the bottom left corner. In fact, a little vignette might do the trick, and help the bottom right corner as well. Just a thought. Very nice.
Shawn: Good solid comp and DOF management. The yellows on the flower are pretty blown and I wonder if that could be dialed back a bit to bring out some detail on the petals. Nice capture with your close up rig. >=))>
Shawn, the color match between the fly and the flower look great. It’s also nice that you caught it with its proboscis out “licking” the pollen. In the larger version, everything looks just a hair soft. That most likely to the combination of high magnification (close focus) and the 5T filter. Those filters are an excellent way to get started with macro, but when you want this much magnification (life size or larger) dioptic filters lose sharpness across the entire field. If you’re going to pursue this much magnification, I strongly encourage you to get a set of extension tubes. They provide more magnification while not reducing the sharpness of your lens.
