How to take the white moth in the dark background?

Photoskipper

Got some challenge this morning. I saw a small (about 1 inch) silver white moth standing on a rock in the shade of a very thick wood.

The strong reflection from the silver white wings fooled the meter and I did couple of shoots with flash and also manual exposure till I got this one.

Any recommendation?

Osprey Whisperer

It's difficult with wildlife (or anything moving or the possibility of movement) but an often used method of landscape photographers could be used here.

Take two (very quickly in succession) pictures of the same shot (bug) You'll want to vary exposure of these 2 shots. One exposed for the bright silver white bug. The second , expose for the dark shadows / background.

Then back at the computer combine the two images using photoshop. Either using masks or the erase tool. YOu can select what parts of the photo you want to combine. There are many articles on this technique on the internet. Goole is your friend. The end result will give you an image about as well exposed as you can get. The camera can't do this itself inside.

If you only have time for one shot...expose for the whites (lights). You can always recover a bit of detail from the darks in photoshop. If you blow the whites (lights) you can't recover them (unless you clone parts of the subject that were not overexposed). You can also try to replicate the above process in photoshop with only one image (exposure). Just doesn't net at good of results.

YOu can open two of the same image and process each version for different exposures / effects. Then combine them and take the best of both worlds.

Many difficult exposure situations out there in the real world.

Nice shot.

Photoskipper

Thanks for advise.

I did couple of shoots with different setting. Finally, I took the last one with the old method : under exposure and recover with the photoshop.

Knowing the object might not stay long, I decided to use the mounted lens 70-200 F2.8 without tripod. By the time I got my 100 mm Macro out, the bug disappeared.

PGM

Great tutorial, Mike. Thanks, Pam