Dragon and Damsel eyes

[Dennis]

Hello,

An early morning visit to the Roma Street Parklands yesterday provided the following macro photos of some quite willing subjects.

The EWD and Damselfly were very tolerant of my presence – they were either very sleepy or my field craft has improved!

The Wrens were manually over-exposed by +2 stops, (compared to auto exposure evaluative mode), due to the heavy back lighting.

Some of the bright OOF shrubbery surrounding the moulting male Wren was quite distracting, so I made an attempt in CS5 to clean it up using “Content Aware Fill” as my skills in selections and re-touching are very basic.

Cheers

Dennis

(Canon 7D, Canon 100mm F2.8 Macro, Canon 580EX II flash).

[troypiggo (Troy)]

Excellent set, Dennis. The EWD eye is great, as are all the others, but it just gives a bit more to look at that you don't normally see. Like the female wren too.

I must've just missed you. I dropped in with my son around 7.30 up at the playground, then wandered down through the garden 8.30 or so. Captured that ant mimic spider on the way out around 9.

[Dennis]

Hi Troy

It’s a shame we missed each other, it would have been great to work the gardens together! We were there from approx 7:00am to 9:00am, spending the last ½ hour in the Fern Gully end of the park.

In the spectacle gardens, we saw several EWD’s lazily feasting on bees, picking them off as easy snacks, whilst the hard working bees, oblivious to the danger, visited the lower blooms.

Cheers

Dennis

[Poita (Peter)]

Really nice stuff, achieving that level of macro focus is a real skill. The female wren looks a touch overexposed, but the detail is fantastic. Beautiful stuff.
What is an EWD?

[Dennis]

Originally Posted by Poita

Really nice stuff, achieving that level of macro focus is a real skill. The female wren looks a touch overexposed, but the detail is fantastic. Beautiful stuff.
What is an EWD?

Thanks Peter, I think you are right about the over exposure on the female Wren. I used the same (manual) settings as the Male Wren that I was trying to dig out of the deeper shade. Pity there is no voice interface to modern DSLRs, so you could just utter the command “F8” or “1/640” without the need to twiddle dials!

EWD=Eastern Water Dragon.

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman (Mike)]

Incredible again! What a pro!

[Poita (Peter)]

How close was the end of the lens to the EWD?

[Dennis]

Originally Posted by Poita

How close was the end of the lens to the EWD?

Hi Peter

I think I got to within 10-12 inches (25-30 cms) before the (small) EWD became too twitchy, whereupon I back off.

Here is the full frame re-sampled to 800 pix.

Cheers

Dennis

[Dennis]

Originally Posted by iceman

Incredible again! What a pro!

Thanks Mike.

Ahh, the benefits of having a standard set up, tested operating procedures and an established processing workflow.

Cheers

Dennis