I found this fly snacking on a purple cone flower and decided I had to give it a try. They move so fast going from spot to spot looking for pollen. I flirted with trying to stack, however with the speed this guy was moving at plus the wind, I decided to just focus on the fly.
Used a tripod, extension tube and polarizer. Set my camera at f/6.3, 1/4000sec., iso 1000 @105mm, taken at 10:10am July 25. In post (ACR) I used TK linear profile with auto edit selected. Did some noise reduction on the background and sharpened the fly a bit.
Is the noise in the background distracting? Fly sharp? Is the OOF flower in the foreground a distraction? Any other thoughts and comments are welcome.
Linda, he looks like he is on top of the world. He looks sharp to me, and the noise in the BG is only noticeable when enlarged to the largest size. It has been years since I used ACR to edit images, so I am not sure if you have a noise slider on it, and if you do the same as in LR, hold down the Alt key in Windows, and it turns the image to white/black, and you pull the slider to the right until the things you care about keeping sharp starts to turn black, and back it up a bit. I’m okay with the oof flower in the BG, knowing that would have taken focus stacking to avoid. I like the composition with the round top of the Coneflower. You might could crop a bit more off the top and right, just to get the fly a bit more off center. Another thought is a square crop, bringing the crop in especially from the left and top some maybe. Something to play with, but I think what you have is good too.
Hi Linda, this is a fascinating photo of that fly and aptly named. The fly has lots of detail when enlarged, so I would say “pretty sharp”. Noise not an issue either and the OOF foreground puts the fly on center stage. Agree with Shirley’s crop suggestion as a way to slightly improve the overall comp.
Thanks, @Shirley_Freeman and @Jim_Lockhart for your kind thoughts about cropping, totally makes sense and have done that and like it much better. Yes, Shirley I have just started experimenting with the ALT/slider tool in ACR for creating a mask for sharpening. Great find and it seems to work for me since I don’t have a 3rd party program for sharpening/denoising. I did use that technique to sharpen the fly. Then used the radial tool inverted to reduce the noise in the background. Didn’t want to push it too much, but perhaphs a bit more would have been better.
Linda, this looks great as posted. Fascinating how the strong colors in the flower and background set off the plainness of the fly. Its details look good as well. Unless it was quite windy, you probably didn’t need 1/4000 s (maybe 1/1000 s…) but your choices worked well.
Thanks, @David_Bostock and @Mark_Seaver, appreciate your thoughts. @Mark_Seaver, I may have been a little over enthusiastic about pushing the SS, but great practice.
