Hyper Moth

Overread · Aug 14, 2009

f13, ISO 200, 1/200sec flash support used

Link to larger: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3549/3820895417_bae7390aed_o.jpg

Sometimes we go for and get those shots were we don't have much of an idea what we are really after from the shot save to grab the subject in the frame - this is very much how I feel about this shot. to me the exposure is nothing outstanding, so composition and content have to pick up the slack - compositionaly its very central and could possibly benefit from some crop off the right; as for content, well it shows a good feeding of the butterfly on the flower as well as his twitching wings in the background - so not totally uninteresting.

And that is mostly what I have from this shot - I can't really pull much more from it save to say that he really really liked those flowers!

Any comment/crits welcome - thank you

benlonghair · Aug 17, 2009

The focus is spot on. Needs a bigger flash so you can up the aperture a little to get more DOF, IMO. Needs more flower too.

Overread · Aug 17, 2009

Thanks Ben, the focus was one thing I was a bit iffy about on this - though perhaps in retrospect it is not so much the focus but, as you have found, the depth of field in the shot

hmm I can't recall since I was playing around with my little sunpak flash on the day, but I am fairly sure my 580M2 was the flash in use on this shot. Dispite the flash used, if you look to the purples on the flower you can see that they are right at the overexposure boarderline, so if I had put out more flashpower there is very good chance that I would have had more overexposure problems in the shot

Depth of field wise its tricky, I do most of my work at f13, though I could have stopped down to f16 and still got a good shot and a little more depth I agree - but I would not have stopped down any further since it starts to create diffraction in the lens and that leads to softer overall image quality.

As for the background I think that is more a result of the dim evening light and the dominance of flash (at such a small aperture and fast shutter speed) in being the main light source - a bit more flower would have been nice, but I think I would have needed a second flash dedicated to the plants for this asepct - fine if its a planned shot, but harder to do when the insect itself is highly mobile sadly.