Well it has been quite cool for October,not many insects about,it was 7 degrees here a couple of weeks ago-most unusual.
However,still keen to have ago at some macro,I can see why so many S.E QLD members are selling their astro gear and becoming bimbos.Certainly a lot of enjoyment from macro photography.I found this small white spider with a fly it had caught,a bit difficult to get exposure correct.I used a Canon 50D and a Canon 60 mm macro with EX430 flash-with the usual bimbo settings.Some basic PP in DPP and a crop on some in CS5.
Hope these are of interest,thanks for looking-Chris
This is a difficult shot with all the whites and the dark fly – it is easy to either blow the whites or under expose, turning them to a dull grey.
It looks like there is a gap on the RHS of the Histogram and this is making the whites look quite dull with a flat, low contrast look about them. Have a go at stretching the histogram more to the right where you will blow some of the brighter whites but I think the main body of whites will then look better provided, you are not too aggressive which would lose the texture in the petals.
Had a lot of issue when taking these images,the spider was so white on the white flower,and the flash light bounced of petals and made things difficult,I should have gone and put the diffuser on.
Yes-do look flat,I used DPP for all this pp,only cropped in cs5,I have just taken RAW back through cs5 and had another play around.here it is(well a couple of goes!the second all I did was play around on the first page of CS5 where the temp is,and took
it into pp to crop-that's all,the first also fiddled in layers,is there any improvement in these from the first attempts posted?)
thanks,Chris
Last edited by hotspur; 24-10-2011 at 10:03 PM.
Reason: added a bit
Looking better Chris. I just downloaded the latest version of Canon’s Digital Photo Professional V 2.10.2 and punched a couple of my Raw files through it and then saved them as jpgs. The results were quite pleasing so it does a really good job without always having to perform a lot of operations in Photoshop.
Yes,improved from the first ones which looked flat.Not sure which of these second attempts is the better one,but thinking #2.
It seemed it bit easier to get the gap closed a bit in CS5.Yes I see the preferred method for Canon users is to DPP and the finish off in CS5.I will look for that latest version of DPP,and upload it.
Good series of shots Chris - this is a thomisidae (aka flower or crab spider). Nice crisp shots, they do look a bit flat, but that's hard to avoid with such a contrast between the petals, light coloured spider, and dark coloured fly. What you could do is 2 shots from the same RAW - one for spider highlights, one for fly detail, combine them in Photoshop as separate layers and use the brush history to bring in the details (depending on which image you make the background image) of the lighter/darker subject. Best of both worlds.
Getting good contrast in the lighting can be tricky - I usually aim to get the lighting ratios (e.g. difference between directly lit and shadow areas) right in camera because it takes forever to fix in post.
The flash lighting was a bit harsh - did you have anything to diffuse it? I've found that having something as simple as an A4 sheet of paper between the flash (zoomed wide if possible) and subject will do wonders, possibly a second sheet nearby as a reflector to provide fill lighting.
Re exposure: with my dSLR I always shoot RAW and plan on (at least minimal) post processing, so I normally follow the "expose to the right" approach using the histogram. Basically, I expose the scene as far right on the histogram as I can without clipping too much (my RAW converter seems to recover about 2/3 - 1 stop of clipping quite well). In Lightroom/Photoshop, I "underexpose" the shot to a proper exposure and then apply levels/contrast/colour adjustments as desired.
This approach seems to work really well for me - the photos look very rich and "real" on wide gamut monitors and large prints.
Yes-very tricky,I could barely see the spider-even when looking closely.it was middle off day and rather windy,so all up quite a challenge.
I was fairly pleased with second batch of results in thread.Bit could go back into RAW and do the masking you mention Dave.I'm not much of a macro photographer-but its quite enjoyable and somewhat addictive!
