"Froghopper", trying more outdoor shooting.

[blairo1]

It was nice and sunny outside today so I was shooting ISO 100, s/s 60-
100th sec f-16.

I am still trying for the sort of close-ups I want to be shooting when I finally
get a macro lens so this was shot using an 18-55mm EF-s lens, then I've
cropped right in. PITA trying to get this little hopper in focus and I'm still not
quite there.

http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m15/Blairo/hopper_5.jpg

The leaves of the plant are incredibly waxy so it was really hard to avoid any
amount of harsh glare whilst keeping the hopper in decent exposure :confused:.

Thoughts? Critiques? This is a pretty new style of shooting for me.
I do have a bunch of pics (well about 5) so I guess I should make those in
seperate posts? Work through them one by one sort of thing lol.

Thanks for any input!

[alanhill]

I like it. The sheen on the leaf is rather bright, but I'm not sure how you could have avoided it. Perhaps a slightly lower viewpoint would have helped and it would have made a more interesting angle on the 'hopper too.

Alan

[blairo1]

Thanks for the positive input Alan.

I have actually got other shots of the hopper from a lower viewpoint to post
up. With this one I was trying to "mimic" the classic 'poison dart frog on
a leaf' that you see in NatGeo or something like that lol. Maybe I missed it.

I was tempted to fiddle with levels on the highly reflective bit but I wanted
to post the image up first. If anyone wants to have a go at adjusting it then
please, go to town, I won't take offence.

The answer here was obviously a different angle but unfortunately that didn't
warrant the kind of composition I wanted, it was just so bright out there I
needed to use a diffuser of some sort - I don't have any cloth that would be
thin enough though (trying to be cheap).

Hmm.

[blairo1]

Here are the other two hopper shots that I took that day:

Focus wasn't great on this one, very hard to focus on this guy from my
minimum distance:
http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m15/Blairo/hopper.jpg

This one I intend to crop again to include the end of the bud at the left, it
just doesn't look quite right.
http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m15/Blairo/hopper2.jpg

[chubasco]

Blair, the first one is a cool shot! Yeah, focus could be tighter on the insect,
but I like where you were going with this, the POV, and nailing foreground
and background bokeh! Nice.

[blairo1]

Here are the originals of the two shots above...

[alanhill]

I was tempted to fiddle with levels on the highly reflective bit but I wanted to post the image up first.

I'm not sure that Levels will help much in this situation. I wrote a little about techniques for reducing leaf shine here (http://www.aquatic-photography.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4689)

I prefer the first image to the later ones, perhaps because I don't like montbretia.

Alan

[Dracofish]

I agree with Alan on the glare. However, maybe playing around with the clone/healing brush in PS would help a bit. Then again, that depends on if you agree with modifying your images in that fashion.

I really do like the composition and that little guy is so cute!

[blairo1]

Thanks for that link Alan, very useful.

Dracofish thanks for your input, I love some of your shots that I have seen.
Re cloning - it's not that I disagree with modifying the image in that way, it's
just that I don't want to because it is something I should get right when I take
the shot. Sure touching up some of the minor flaws afterwards is understandable
but the level of 'chopping' that would need doing to remove that glare is,
IMO, too much.

It's a nice sunny day again here so I'm going to practice some more.

:)