Two new dragons

Dalantech

I'm going to my mother in law's farm this week, so I'm hoping to shoot something other than these purple devils :wink





C&C always welcome :

Dick on Aruba

Nice capture, well done. I like the 1st the most.

Thanks for sharing.

Dick.

Dalantech

Dick on Aruba wrote:

Nice capture, well done. I like the 1st the most.

Thanks for sharing.

Dick.

Thanks! I was paying a lot of attention to the background on that one...

Awais Yaqub

lovely i loved 2nd for its simplicity and colors

Aussie_bluey

Nice colours and good sharpness.
Tim

SteveF

Really like the second. Tough to get enough DOF to fully encompass these, but your focal plane captures the image really well.

Dalantech

Awais Yaqub wrote:

lovely i loved 2nd for its simplicity and colors

Thanks Awais! I liked how the reed leaf crossed the frame in the viewfinder, but I wasn't sure how the background would turn out...

Dalantech

Aussie_bluey wrote:

Nice colours and good sharpness.
Tim

Thanks Tim!

Dalantech

SteveF wrote:

Really like the second. Tough to get enough DOF to fully encompass these, but your focal plane captures the image really well.

Thanks Steve!

I had to shoot both of them with a very shallow depth of field due to the backgrounds. If you look at the first image that dried up flower that the dragon is perched on is repeated, but out of focus, in the background. If you were to look at that scene in person you'd see dead flower after dead flower and all manner of stems -the shots that I took from about a meter didn't work at all because too much of the background was in focus and distracting.

The same holds true for the second image -lots of reeds and reed leaves in the background. If I had stopped down there would have been too much detail in the background and the dragon wouldn't stand out.

The other alternative is to shoot in full manual mode, stop down to F11 or so, and use the flash as the primary source of light. But doing that would completely change the way the dragon looked -the colors would be off. Also the background would have been almost completely black, and although some folks like that style of closeup / macro shooting I don't because it takes the critter out of context -I could have shot it in my living room...