Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
The summer has ended with wet days and the last tomatoes in my garden aren’t real beauties… But one of them is the home of this tiny snail. Maybe 0.25" or so. It was moving surprisingly fast on the surface of the fruit and it was more difficult than expected to capture it. Maybe it was disturbed, becaused the tomatoe was put on a table and the natural environment had disappeared? I had to reposition the tomatoe several times until I had more or less the shot that I desired.
Specific Feedback
Any and all.
Technical Details
Pentax K3 Mk. III, Sigma 2.8/70mm @ f/6.3, ISO 200, 1/500 sec.
Very little processing, except cropping and a small curves correction.
1 Like
Hi Hans,
A nice, colorful composition resulted from your efforts. The head is slightly out of focus as my only nit. Use a smaller aperture for increased depth of field. I would have gone with f16 and a higher ISO to get everything necessary in focus. Otherwise, a nice capture…Jim
Han, what a neat find. I don’t think I have ever seen a snail on a tomato before. It’s like he is on top of his “red world”. As @Jim_Zablotny has noted, the head and eyes are slightly out of focus. When shooting macro, there is very little distance that your focus area will cover, hence something like f16 is required. He also gave some good advice of an increased f-stop to improve depth of field. That shell has some really nice colors and texture that would have been nice as well.
Hi Han, interesting capture with the snail extended like this. Nice color contrasts in this image. Good advice given above I think.
Love the color and composition was well done.
Very cool, Han. We certainly don’t see many snail images and they’re very neat critters. Not much I can add to the other’s critiques except to say that I love the composition.
Thanks, @Jim_Zablotny , @Dean_Salman , @Dennis_Plank , @Shirley_Freeman and @Allen_Sparks for your comments.
Yes, a smaller aperture like f/16 would have made it easier to get everything in focus. But at the expense of the BG. So I consider this a compromise.
Here is another one, with f/10 (and ISO1600). I less like this one, mainly because of the shadow of the snail on the tomato.
Han, there certainly is better detail throughout the snail and his shell in this one. I prefer the angle of the first one because it isn’t looking down on him so much. It is a compromise many times in photography, giving up DOF, or have a busy BG. When the subject is slow like this, and no worries of it leaving you before you get a shot, we can sometimes move about till we find what works best with the settings that work for what we are looking for. It is fun though, seeing what we can get.
Excellent find!! And extra points for the persistence to get the shots. They do move faster than you want sometimes. I love both angles, and how he seems to be floating in the first one, and how the scar on the tomato suggests a cute little tail in the second one!
