I was out fairly early when I noticed the scintillating light off the water behind this dragonfly.
Technical Details
I used my Nikon D850 with a 300mm f2.8 AIS lens and small extension tube. It was shot at f8, 1/1250 sec, ISO 400, handheld.
Kerry, thank you for sharing this nice image. You placed it in the Macro Showcase category, which means no critiques are allowed. If that isn’t what you had in mind, please let me know and I can move it into Macro Critiques.
Thank you, Shirley. You may transfer into critiques I guess that’s why I joined!
Sincerely,
Kerry Carloy
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I moved it into Critiques for you. I do like the back lighting on this one, Kerry. All of those light reflections (I can’t think of the name for it) of the aperture helps balance the image, in my opinion. If it was mine, I think I would try pulling down the brightness just a little and open up the shadows a bit so the head and body of the Skimmer shows up a little better. I also noticed in the larger version that it has some chromatic aberration which you might want to remove. You captured nice details in the Skimmer’s wings for sure, love that texture.
Thank you, Shirley! I do see the magenta fringing now that you brought it to my attention. I was after sort of a silhouette, I guess, allowing the wings to get the widow skimmer identification across; hence, the lack of Zone IV shadows. From my own self criticism, I wish I had used a rounder aperture. The octagons are a little…mechanical? It would have looked more like a natural blur of points of light in the background.
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Hi and welcome to NPN, Kerry. Glad to see you jump right in with this very summer-y post. Our dragons are just about gone. Saw a few stragglers while out kayaking today, but they’ll be gone soon. This is a great show of those wings and the environment - all that scintillation as you say. I agree with what Shirley said about some issues, but those should be easy to fix. Too bad it wasn’t turned toward you so the face could be in focus. And yeah, the bokeh balls aren’t as lovely as they might be, but overall the photo works well.
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Thank you, Kristen! I don’t guess there would be a point in fixing and replacing since this is about critique? If issues were mended in the photo on the page the suggestions wouldn’t make much sense?
Kerry
Most of us post a re-edited image in the original post for comparison, You can edit your subject line to indicate you have by adding + new post or new edit, something like that. When you do this we can go from one to the other easily and see any changes you made. Make sense?
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Ok, thank you. Will do.