I was working our wisteria this afternoon when I noticed this wasp working over a nearby bloom. I quickly turned and got this shot just as he crawled into an unobstructed view. As soon as I hit the shutter he took off. I didn’t have time to refine the focus and got lucky that it was close but not sharp enough to post as a regular shot. (see below) I tried to make some lemonade by applying a simple oil filter.
Type of Critique Requested
Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.
Conceptual: Feedback on the message and story conveyed by the image.
Specific Feedback and Self-Critique
Do you ever try to rescue a marginal image by doing some Photo Art processing? Does this work for you?
Technical Details
Sony A7RIII
Minolta 200mm macro
ISO 400, 1/250 @ f9
You’ve really pulled a rabbit out of the hat here, Bill. The composition is very good, and I particularly like what the filter has done to the background. I’ve tried filters on too many of my shots, without success like this! It suggests a good topic for a Weekly Challenge too (though maybe it’s been done already). Did you use a Photoshop filter?
The subject, colors and composition are beautiful, Bill. But I truly enjoy your very gentle use of the PS oil filter (I think that what it is?). The filter adds a nice soft feel to the scene.
Bill, I like what you did with this. The “oil painting” filter did the job. Wonderful composition and color. I have done the same before, but never accomplished as good a result. Nice.
Yes, I do.
I have an image of a woodpecker that was taken with a P900 camera (5.6 crop factor, cell phone size sensor), the quality was pretty low so I added the same oil paint treatment as you have here and it looks pretty good to me but I hesitate to post it.
And it wouldn’t be appropriate to post it in this thread because I don’t want you or others to feel that I’m trying to hijack your thread, or leave the impression that it’s about my image rather than yours.
So, yes, it absolutely works for me, I really like it!
The colors in this are wonderful, the BG blur and complimentary colors are perfect and the paper wasp is outlined by the oil paint treatment very well.
I’m glad you posted this, now I don’t feel so bad about using that method to recover some of my own images
What a lovely subject, with wonderful lighting and composition and the DOF is very appealing. The rest of the image is so wonderful that I prefer the un-painted version, even with the wasp a bit soft. It’s so close, I wonder if some sort of sharpening might work, just applied to (masked to) the wasp. As much as I love the new denoise filters, I have always found the sharpening ones disappointing, but this image is so nice that it’s worth a try.
I hope to see more of your Wisteria! It is such an appealing subject and I’ve never been able to do what I want with it.
Bill, your “painting” is a fine “rescue”. I’m amazed at how it seems to have sharpened the wasp and your handling of the leaf tip at the left looks very good as well. It does make for an fine piece of photo art.
