The Day Before the First Day of Spring

Rathbone · Mar 20, 2007

Been a long time since I have posted!

flyingseale · Mar 20, 2007

#2 is beautifully captured. I'm looking forward to trying some insect macros myself as soon as the weather and flowers cooperate, but I'm guessing my glass is going to limit my success. I'm guessing there's a lot of trial and error involved in getting such good shots?

Rathbone · Mar 20, 2007

Trial and error, and a sometimes just good luck (preparation increases the odds) I love catching insects in mid flight but you can't catch them, sometimes you just have to keep snapping and they just take off while you are doing it. If you wait until they take off and then try to snap they are already gone. Thats why I take 200 pictures in hopes I might get 2 or 3 worth keeping!

LaFoto · Mar 21, 2007

Rathbone said:
Been a long time since I have posted!

That may be true, but now you are having quite a powerful comeback!!!
Very nice focus on the insects along with the flowers and bees in flight are extra special. I have never so far managed to produce a clear shot of the kind, I think...........

Maybe these photos all have a tendency to being a bit centred ... and could increase dynamics by means of some creative cropping (not the third, that obviously is a crop out of a much larger original frame), thus moving your subjects off centre a bit?

Rathbone · Mar 21, 2007

LaFoto said:
Maybe these photos all have a tendency to being a bit centred ...

Right you are, this is a result of the point of focus option on my camera, where you have 5 points and the default is the center. This of course is changeable, but since I spend a lot of time shooting moving targets I usually don't have a lot of time to think about it, the bee is there and zip! it's gone lol. Then during the editing process I do think about the centering (because of you actually lol) but it's in the back of my mind I might make prints someday so I want to keep it somewhat close to standard dimensions. Sometimes to crop the picture to make a off centered dynamic composition (which I am in agreement with you there) I would have to crop in something closer to a square. But then I guess that's what mats are for, huh?

Art is like....complicated.

LaFoto · Mar 21, 2007

Well, whenever I crop a photo later because I am not happy with my composition, I usually crop it so it stays with the print ratio, which - provided I were to reduce a pic to 800 pixels wide - is 800x533 for pics that come out of my 350D and 800x600 for pics from the Powershot. I keep checking until I get back there (always hoping I need not crop into anything "of value" that I'd actually want to keep).

In that case I can also have that crop printed if I wanted to.