Red Dragonfly

This red dragonfly was sitting on a tomato plant in my garden. Please help

me out with constructive commends on how you think I could improve this

photo. Hope you enjoy.

Thank you.

This is what I call real macro! Mighty lens well used, and what you could do better I don't see! I suppose better DOF wasn't possible nor needed here! You could do only more shots from different angles!

Best regards Kyle!

PDE

Thank you very much for your very encouraging comment. I do have other angles on this guy and will upload them eventually. Though I wish I had more time to take photos of it before it flew off. 

Cheers.

Hi Kyle,

Nice capture.

The Nikkor 105 at F/2.8 would have provided a better impact, since you emphasis is on the head only, shooting the Nikkor wide open is the only way to obtain the maximum definition from such a lens.

Now, if you were so close that even F/2.8 would not focus the head, then a slight backing away would have accomplished the ultimate effect of a high definition image shot at F/2.8.

As an added benefit, your ISO would be 100 not 400, and the exposure would have been 1/500 sec not 1/250 sec. Every factor would be optimized.

Best Regards,  Mike

Thank you again for an extremely detailed and thorough critique. I keep your comments in mind when I go out with my camera.

One thing I have to say for this particular photo is that similar to the squash vine this dragonfly is deceptive. You can't see it here because I have already cropped it down so far but it was particularly small. I had to crop it quite a bit already just to get it this large. Keep in mind that I process and take my photos with the intent of making large prints of them which limits my ability to move back and rely on cropping. There is a balance there and I definitely try to take advantage of the larger sensor in the D7000 and cropping but I don't want to go too far because crop it too much and I won't be able to make the large prints that I want to.

Also for the aperture this photo is at 1:1 and I may be wrong but focusing that close or even at a medium distance the maximum aperture that the lens can open up to goes down. I had a flash and plenty of light the only reason this ended up at iso400 was a mistake on my part as I forgot to take it out of auto iso and fix it at iso100 before taking the photo and after I figured it out the dragonfly had flown away.

That small mistake cost me reduced noise and faster shutter speed. I wish it hadn't happened and I will be more aware from now on. I agree with you that iso100 and 1/500th shutter speed both would have benefit the picture.

Thank you again for the detailed assessment. Hopefully I learn from your post and it helps improve my next set of photos.

Cheers. :)

Hi Kyle,

Thank you for providing me the details of what your end goal is, to make larger prints.

My answer to that is  (you probably guessed it)  is to use a larger starting format, like the Nikon D700, etc, but that is a greater expense and one that is probably not necessary. Furthermore , lens designed for DX formats will not be suitable for FX work, either.

Years ago, when I shot film images professionally, i was faced with the same trade offs. I went from 35mm film all the way to 4X5 inch sheet film, but the expense of having many film cameras and lens with various formats was paid for by the work that I accomplished under contract.

Best Regards,  Mike