Dragon Fly - Looking for CC

Jaynus

OK, so I know I don't post here very often, but I do browse all the time.

Anyway, I got this shot yesterday and am looking for some serious cc. Every photography forum I've posted it on so far has been full of comments like "WOW!" "Awesome!" etc. etc. PLEASE be honest and tell me if it totally sucks, I plan on renaming myself Lady V one day. :rofl (In my dreams that is, lol)



Oh, and it landed on a garden gnome so the background is a bit rubbish, I know.

GOLDENORFE

hi there, not too bad, like composition. focus looks ok but light is quite harsh and therefore has burned out fine detail. exposing against white background quite difficult.
lighting is the most important thing to get right to give a sharp detailed image.
multiple large highlights in the eyes, presume you used flash so you have both harsh sun and flash highlights.
what lens/flash did you use?

Jaynus

Thanks Phil. Now that's the type of CC I like.

The comp was done pp. The gnomes face is in the original (it's the nose he's perched on).

I used my Tamron 90mm and unfortunately my on-board flash as this was a very impromptu opportunity. And yep, full sun too hence the horrific glares. But I totally see what you mean and will work on that in the future.

Thanks again!

Icebear

I may learn slowly, but I do learn. One thing I've learned is that backlighting is really difficult to deal with in macro shooting. That white BG murdered your contrast with "bleed-around." That's an esoteric technical term that I just made up. On a darker BG, that would have been a real nice image.

Lord Vetinari

Came out pretty well. Focus is very good and shooting angle/composition pretty good. Fairly harsh highlights from the sun and the flash.
As commented above fairly hard to shoot against a very light BG - not tried a gnomes nose before but do sometimes try to shoot against the sky with dragonflies and end up shooting fill flash with a upto +1 EC and 0 FEC . A CPL filter might help to reduce the sun highlight and some form of diffusion on the pop up flash help to reduce the flash highlight.
One of the problems with macro is you often do not get much choice with the backgrounds

Brian V.

Jaynus

Thanks guys. Shame it landed where it did, but I'm just happy I finally got a shot of one! How you guys get them when they're flying is just amazing!

So basically the problems with this shot are all down to using my pop-up flash (which I hate using) and the fact it was on a white background. Would like to have used my SB900 but that was indoors and I didn't want to miss the shot.

Brian, I don't own a CPL filter, going to look into that right now.

Thanks again folk, I really appreciate h&h cc!!