This queen Xylocopid Carpenter bee was working the red salvia blossoms where we were staying in Arizona a couple of years ago. It was quite tattered but still going strong.
Crop, colors, comp, subject condition?, etc. Thanks for taking a look and letting me know your thoughts.
Canon 7DMii, f7.1, 1/1600s, iso 800, 100-400 lens at 400mm.
Ed, this is a fine look at this carpenter bee. He does look like he has had a rough go of it, as his tattered wings tell the story. If this was mine (I wish it was) I think I would try cropping just a touch off the left to remove the bits of brighter stems from the salvia plant. You really captured nice details in the bee and the stem he is on.
Hi Ed. I was thinking the same thing about cropping as Shirley mentioned. If you want to maintain the aspect ratio, you have room to take it off the top without interfering with anything. If you have the raw file, you might bring up the shadows/black just a bit in the bee as the darkest areas don’t show any detail. If not, don’t worry about it much as that’s how we see things in nature anyhow.
Thank you @Shirley_Freeman and @Dennis_Plank. I went a head and re-cropped, and tried to lift the shadows a bit more on just the bee. It ends up being a pretty significant crop, and I went ahead and ran it through Topaz denoise and sharpen.
More of a crop than I was thinking of, but this works quite well. The detail in the bee held up just fine and it looks really good.
It was more of a crop than I had in mind but as @Dennis_Plank said, it works. I like what you did with the shadows too. Nice improvement in my opinion.
Thank you Shirley and Dennis.
Well done! I really like the lighting, and the textures. My personal pick is the first one.
Ed: Tardy to the party but I like both iterations with a slight preference for the crop. I like the bold color palette and the clarity of this old soldier. Nicely done.>=))>
Very cool, thank you @Dave_Douglass and @Bill_Fach.
