Wait a sec, that's not a bird!
Well, I said that all I had to draw from was bird shots, which was true when I wrote it. Then yesterday I stumbled - almost literally - across this guy having a nap, hanging off the grass about 8 inches off the ground. I quickly swapped lenses so that I had the macro on and lay down on the ground to get a nice straight-on shot with the camera partially supported on the ground.
I was lying right on top of a red ant nest, of course.
After just a couple of shots (to be sure that I'd have one that would be good) it was time to get up and away from the ants. Just as well, as he started twitching/vibrating just after that; about 30 seconds later he took off. The twitchy/vibrating thing was interesting to watch - it looked very much like an old propeller plane starting up with cold engines, a little rough at first, not firing on all cylinders, but getting smoother as the engine warmed up and the oil started to flow.
As usual I've had a challenge getting the colour/brightness/tone to come out accurately. Might have been less of a challenge if I didn't use Photoshop to process, but I wanted to mute the background and you just can't do that with any other program. The dragonfly as you see it here is pretty close to what I had in Photoshop (which was very accurate to what I shot), except that the colours here aren't quite as vibrant (at no time did I fiddle with the saturation - it really was this colourfull).
4 comments:
Awesome photo! I love the colours of the insect (what is it - a dragonfly?). I wonder if you were able to get any photos of his full wing span - seems unfortunate to have them cut off.
Alison: Yes, this is a dragonfly.
There's always a trade-off in images. In this case, in order to get the full wingspan in the picture would have required moving farther back resulting in a smaller image of the body and a lot more background to crop out later, and it was the body that I was most interested in capturing - this time out at least.
Also, it's very hard to get everything in focus when shooting macro - there is very little depth of field. In this case the body/head came out wonderfully, with the focus dropping off as you move toward the tail-end. The wings, which aren't in a flat plane with the body are almost impossible to get in focus at the same time.
All that said, I actually did crop this image down, eliminating a bit of wings captured in the original image - they're out of focus and consequently distracting to the rest of the picture.
Beautiful. Did you use an image editor to eliminate the background colour or was this a macro technique? I'm new to photography but familar with fireworks/adobe.
Just curious.
This was done via layers in Photoshop: first I copied the original image to a new layer, desaturated it and then applied an overlay colour (in the blending options) to get the background colour that I wanted. Then the original image was duplicated to a new layer again and moved to the top. All the non-dragonfly bits were masked out of this layer (actually, I masked the whole thing and then painted the dragonfly back in) allowing the desaturated/colour-modified layer to show through for the background.
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