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
Trying to be interesting and artistic
The star is the hoverfly (under 1cm long)
All about the light…again
Showing hoverfly in the sunlight going about its business
Lots of context with flowers intentionally mildly blurred and OOF
Feedback Requested
Does the star carry the story and the interest
Is it a pleasing composition with nice shapes and colours
Does it work as a nice interesting insect image where the latter isn’t over zoomed and massively detailed?
You have succeeded in making the image interesting and artistic. I have a couple of images, that I may post later, where I am trying to achieve the same idea. (With a nice insect, doing insect things, in the big picture, looking artistic.) Sounds easy, not.
I love the shape of the flower stem and the position of the hoverfly. The greens look lovely, but feel the white flowers take over the scene. Maybe lower the highlights and contrast and add a touch of texture?
Very nice capture and composition! The star, the hoverfly, is nicely in focus and in a very nice pose. As noted by @Glenys_Passier , the bright flowers compete for the fly’s attention. Some ideas that might help would be to recrop and put the fly in the middle of the image and/or possibly burn the wing structure to make the wings more visible.
Thanks @Glenys_Passier - that is definitely a nice summary of my thought processes.
I took some care trying to balance the hoverfly on the right with the mass of flowers on the left compositionally, with the protagonists on the diagonal.
@Willemd Thanks for your ideas. I have tried playing with the detail but as I’m sure you are aware burning in translucent structures darkens the show through background which can look awful. I have added micro contrast and masked the hoverfly from the texture explosion but can’t satisfactorily burn the wings - with my technical skills anyway. I have tried the hoverfly central but in this image the detail and motion blur don’t really tolerate the centre of attention scrutiny.
I definitely prefer the repost, Huw.. the hoverfly seems much more prominent even though the flowers are sharper-an interesting phenomenon that I’ll have to try to keep in mind. The revision achieves your idea of making it artistic and displaying the hoverfly in it’s world very nicely.
