Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Landscape & Nature Photography => Topic started by: Arlen on June 06, 2016, 09:49:35 am
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Consigned by its lot to a life of toil, anonymity and underappreciation.
(http://www.pbase.com/art1/image/163392550/original.jpg)
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Consigned by its lot to a life of toil, anonymity and underappreciation.
Hi Arlen,
Well done. I know how hard it is to get a shot like this, with lack of DOF, lack of light, too much motion, almost no time to react.
I do wonder why not in colour (no saying it would be better, because that depends on colours we don't know), and if that colour could have been used to selectively darken the background instead of burning it? I rarely do B&W shots myself, but when I do I like to add a bit of toning (e.g. platinum) which is easy to control with e.g. Topaz B&W Effects, or Google Silver Efex.
Cheers,
Bart
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I love it! Your lighting and processing are great, and well suited to this macro.
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+1 Superb!
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Stunning shot…
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Excellent work (http://www.thenaturephotographer.club/images/smilies/saludos.gif)
What x magnification is that, Arlen?
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Superb
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Wow!
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amazing.
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Thanks everyone for your feedback. It's nice to see that the little laborer's likeness resonates with some folks.
Bart, yes it is a challenge to get everything that's important reasonably in focus and sharp at this magnification--especially when the subject insists on crawling around, like this one did. So as you might guess, it took a number of shots to get one that was acceptable. And then some judicious processing, including use of some of the Topaz plugins, like InFocus and Detail. I've used a few of the Topaz plugins for a while, but after reading your and other folks comments on them, I recently purchased the entire collection while it was on sale. Still coming up to speed on many of them.
As for the use of B&W instead of color, that was purely a creative choice. I have scads of insect photos in color, and I suspect that many folks might prefer the color version of this one--color is beguiling. But I'm now engaged in a project to make a series of B&W insect portraits, and that's what I had in mind here from the beginning.
John, the magnification of the original capture was 1x, using an Olympus E-M1 and Oly 60mm f/2.8 macro lens at f/11. With that system f/11 results in some moderate loss of resolution due to diffraction, but I found that InFocus or Piccure+ do a pretty remarkable job of restoring much of it, so the compromise to gain DOF is often worth it. What you see here is a crop--also intended from the beginning--of about 1/4 of the full frame, which was then upresed by 50%.
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I think the B/W was a good choice for this scene.
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John, the magnification of the original capture was 1x, using an Olympus E-M1 and Oly 60mm f/2.8 macro lens at f/11. With that system f/11 results in some moderate loss of resolution due to diffraction, but I found that InFocus or Piccure+ do a pretty remarkable job of restoring much of it, so the compromise to gain DOF is often worth it. What you see here is a crop--also intended from the beginning--of about 1/4 of the full frame, which was then upresed by 50%.
Thank you.
I thought is was a bit close for 1:1, so thanks for the description.