Flowers + Ant

[Adsos Letter]

:D




Edited to add the ant to the title, although it signed no release...




Re-edited to add a closer crop.


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[Adsos Letter]

1. A critique would be welcomed on these two; I'm trying to learn the functions of the SX200 IS.

:)

[JeffR]

2. Well, I have one problem with it

and that's that it looks oversharpened to me. I'm hypersensitive to this these days as I've been experimenting with different unsharp mask settings in Photoshop, and have yet to find one I'm really happy with. But it's a lovely photo, made all the better by having the flowers set off against the dark background. The greenery seems to grow up from the darkness; really makes it sing.

Oh, and nice ant!

[Adsos Letter]

3. Thanks Jeff! I've been working on getting good stability when I shoot

I used the tripod for this one. I, too, am trying to get the proper balance from photoshop. In this case I adjusted the chromatic and luminant noise levels; perhaps I should have reduced them a bit more to soften things a touch.

The black background is actually the inside of a large planting pot, which these flowers were leaning across.

[JeffR]

4. Now that I look at them again

the first still seems a little attenuated by sharpening, but the second doesn't. Was there significant noise pre-noise reduction?

[Adsos Letter]

5. No; but the amount of adjustment for luminant and chromatic noise

was different for each crop (both were cropped from a larger shot). I may see if I can fine-tune the first one a bit.

[Tindalos]

6. I don't have any real criticisms

If it were me, I might shift the focal plane forward a bit, in front of the ant and focussed on the flower centres. That's just my 2 cents.


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[Adsos Letter]

7. Thanks Tindalos! I may go back to the original and see if I can make it work

the adjustments to the original were not that heavy, so I may be able to do it in photoshop.