Newly emerged damselfly

Lord Vetinari

Found this damselfly this morning just emerged. First shot flash other 2 shots natural light (ISO800).
Brian V.

GOLDENORFE

nice example of lighting Brian, natural light much better,wings reflect too much light. do you agree ?
phil
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goldenorfe/

teamracephotos

Thanks Brian
Great example, It helps to see the difference… reading about it just does not sink in, for me anyways. Thanks MM

I get off work today at 2pm so I will be able to be out in the light I am going to try some natural light shots… and I will be testing out my new Gary Fong diffuser.

l2oBiN

Hi Brian,

Lovely captures. Do you find that the high iso actually degrades the detail content of the image? It seems that when I attempt to shoot at higher iso, more often than not, the high iso grain "masks" this detail, or the noise removal also removes detail that is present such as the eyes of the insect. How do you deal with that? Could you post some examples of closeups/ blow-ups and how much is actually lost?

canon400d

l2oBiN wrote:

Hi Brian,

Lovely captures. Do you find that the high iso actually degrades the detail content of the image? It seems that when I attempt to shoot at higher iso, more often than not, the high iso grain "masks" this detail, or the noise removal also removes detail that is present such as the eyes of the insect. How do you deal with that? Could you post some examples of closeups/ blow-ups and how much is actually lost?

Nice shot Brian. If I could achieve something like that I would be very happy.
Regards
Bob

Awais Yaqub

These are great Sir

MichelleL

Love damselflies!

I've been keeping my iso at 100 or 200 lately - especially when using the flash.

Do you run your photos through a 'noise' reduction program?

MichelleL

Skippy

Lord Vetinari wrote:

Found this damselfly this morning just emerged. First shot flash other 2 shots natural light (ISO800).
Brian V.

Excellent examples of Flash and Natural Light Brian.
You can clearly see a difference.

The flash has cast some shadow over the head of the damsel,
but the colour is more enhanced with the flash.

The finer details like the fine hairs on the underbelly of the damsel are far more visible with the flashed shot too.

Thanks for posting this Brian, good comparison ... Skippy
.

Lord Vetinari

Thanks for the comments all - much appreciated- I far prefer the natural light shots in this case.

I didn't really mean do it as a comparison- I just realised that the flash shot was not what I wanted with the delicate opalescence from the wings, the lack of close background and the pastel colouring of the damselfly.

All the shots were put through noisewarepro at it's lowest setting, interestingly I think there is more residual noise in the dark areas of the ISO200 shot than there is in the well lit BG of the natural light shots (ISO800).

I2oBiN - As indicated above I tend to use noise reduction on all my pics out of habit but only at low noise settings. I tend to find that if the scene is fairly well lit then the noise is not too bad at higher ISO anyway but there is a reduction in detail which I think is more to do with the lack of contrast than the noise. I only tend to do natural light shooting with cloudy conditions as I don't like bright sun natural light macros where the contrast is often too high. I regard diffused flash as somewhere between these two conditions.

Brian V.