I went out to a place called Roper Lake State Park looking for dragonflies which I did find some. Then ran into this pair deep in the brush, you can see why they are hiding. One thing I like about closeup or macro photography you watch you subjects while photographing. Take bees for example, they do quite a bit of cleanup at the flower with themselves. Its amazing. The shutter speed was not enough to freeze the wings of the male which I feel helps the photo. The top fly was hanging on pretty aggressively. Like I said, amazing what happens when we are photographing so close and waiting for the perfect photo.
Specific Feedback Requested
There was a lot of OOF vegetation here and this subject was not all that close and small. Maybe a square crop would work here, any thoughts. I could not move in such a way to remove the dead leaf on the right out of FOV
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Canon 90D Canon 100-400 ii. HH 1/320 f/16 iso 200
Dean: One MUST look at the large view to really appreciate what’s going on here. I agree with you 100% regarding the wing movement. Great find and an equally great capture.>=))>
Dean, photographing small subjects “down in the weeds”, makes a very different (much busier) image than the “usual” clean NPN view. There’s a lot to like in this view, with the wing movement and the softly oof leaves behind. I think some careful burning-in of the very bright foreground leaves could work here.
Dean, I always enjoy finding something different than what I set out to capture. One does need to view this in the large view to appreciate. I think what Mark suggested might improve the image even more. I do like the wing movement too.
Thanks @Bill_Fach , @Shirley_Freeman , and @Mark_Seaver This was not a favorite photo of mind because of the busyness of the plants around it. So I took some of Marks input and did a few things. I changed to a square crop mainly to remove the top part of the white area because of the black shadow being so strong. in PS I used the select color range to select the white area that was the issue. I had to used other selection tools to fine tune it. Then I created a hue saturation adjustment layer to tone down and blend the color with the over all theme of the photo. That left a few areas that needed fixing so used a smart filter for the G Blur and inverted the mask to just select the area that needed fixing.
Dean, I think it improved the image some. It is harsh light, and as @Mark_Seaver said, down in the weeds which makes it much busier than we would like. I’m not sure if you can calm the bright weeds any more than you have and it look natural. A polarizer would probably helped you in this situation, as you had plenty of ISO to spare for the light loss. Hind sight is always best, of course. It is still a pretty good capture, and especially considering something we probably wouldn’t be able to witness by just observing with the eye.
