Mega Fly

Cyrus, you're right on all counts. I rarely rate outside of categories I have no experience in, and as a beginner am hesitant to rate at all except for the clearly outstanding shots. I also prefer to leave comments as I know I appreciate the feedback more. I saw you're in Mass. and guessed you understood

the fly situation up here. The day before the big freeze I had one land on me--

it's December for crying out loud! Darwin would be impressed. My Macro is mostly retired till the warm weather, but have asked for extension tubes from Santa. Stay warm. (If you need any more fly subjects I bet you I could find some.)

I'm so delighted you stopped by, very nice to meet you.
Here, this is how it goes for me:
Often times if I have enough exposure for let's say an ISO of 200 at a certain aperture, I'll move on to a higher ISO setting but overexpose. I do this more often with my Fuji S3 than I do with my D70 or I did with my 20D

Why more with the S3, because I want to take advantage of it's special photo site arrangement, something that a vast majority of Fuji users don't realize and ignore. As you may already know, S3's sensor and the sensors of Fuji's more advanced non DSLR cameras have two sets of photo sites on their sensors, think of it as two sensors for the sake of simplicity. Fuji S3 has 6MP of photo sites that are more sensitive to mid tones and darker tones and 6 MP that are more sensitive to highlights and upper mid tones.By over exposing the shot, I simply make the highlight sensitive part of the sensor work harder.
Now, my own assessment is that S3 gives you a cleaner shot at ISO 800 than D200 does and with the method above, I get an even cleaner shot with considerably more detail in the mid tones and below.
The following shot is a heavy crop of a larger experimental shot I did for you this morning. The full exif should be there, at least in the first shot. The second image I'm posting is a combination of three shots I took at three different ISO settings of 200.400 and 800. All parameters were the same except for the fact that I kept the shutter speed the same by over exposing at the higher ISO settings.
What I am experiencing here, comparing the three shots, is a significant gain in the detail all over at ISO 800. The image at ISO 800 may not show any gain in the noise area but if you were to extract more detail from ISO 200, you'll experience gaining noise as well above and beyond what you have at that ISO setting.
With the fly photo above, I did not have the luxury of light. So I over exposed by 1/2 a stop, did shadow recovery and local noise reduction.
Now, you may want to do the same experiment as bellow and let us know if it works for you as well. I hope my answer is satisfactory. All three shots were taken in raw and converted with the same exact parameters in ACR except for the fact that I reduced the exposure by the same amount that I had over exposed originally. No further post process was done except for resizing and putting the text on them.
The shots were taken in dim natural light. dim enough to get a 1/15 exposure at an aperture of 1.4!Best regards.

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Cyrus, thanks for taking your time to explain and the enclosed photos. Very impressive. I had read about the S3 with the dual sensor areas and thought it was a great concept. I took a wait and see posture but ended up forgeting all about it. I stated in another post that I wasn't going to purchase a Fuji regardless of your comments but...

I'm definetly going to be doing some testing. Thanks again and I'll be in touch, Dave

I do hope you get the tubes from Santa, just make sure that your husband knows about it too!!

Kenko tubes would do the job fine and you, I mean Santa, can buy the set for less than $100.00 on the net. I do hope you get them as I would love to see more and closer Macros from you. It's fun, a lot of fun and you'll never look at a fly the same way as you have, anymore. Besides, Darwin will also be flattered!!

Cheers.

Thanks for the data, my husband has found holiday shopping is so easy when he has a list! (He panics if he has to go it on his own.)

Very nice shot Cyrus, you should be giving lessons in macro shooting.

Birte for the generous comment. I do appreciate you stopping by.

 

Best regards.

Great.7/7

What a great macro capture.

fantastic, faantastic!

absolutely fantastic.. a master work..!

Superb!!