Up close and personal

Critiques, thoughts and comments welcome...

From me you get a 7/7!! What a gorgeous capture with amazing color, exposure and fabulous crystal clear focus on this little guy. I love how you blurred the background to put all the attention on the bug. Great capture - great work!

BEAUTIFUL work! I love the crop and the purple color in the background. Excellent use of DOF and this image is crystal sharp. Very nice, Jason!

Fantastic capture Jason.

Thanks all - it was the one good thing that came out of a shoot of probably more than 100 shot attempts! LOL

Jason--One of the more colorful macro shots I've seen! Nice composition, wonderful exposure, and out of this world color! The only critique I have would be a slight bit more DOF would be nice. This has been a major issue for me with macro--in order to get any DOF at all you have to shut the lens way down which then gives a long exposure and necessitates a tripod. Well, by the time I get the tripod close enough and the composition right the critter I'm shooting has been gone for about 5 minutes! (I'm exaggerating, but you get the point) This is a great effort...keep up the great work! I look forward to seeing more macro from you. How about a sunrise or sunset shoot sometime soon? You can check my folder to see what I've been shooting recently. Lastly, is the offer still open to add a couple simple things to my website for me? I know you've kindly offered many times but I wanted to be sure the offer was still good. Thanks for your help and I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Tyler, you can get greater DOF without a long exposure! You just need a really nice macro lens with 1.2 or better.

Rachel--I guess you are right that having f/1.2 does make the lens faster (even when it's shut down to f/22 or f/32) so your exposure is not so long. However, I haven't even seen an f/1.2 macro lens! I have the Canon 100mm f/2.8, which to my knowledge is pretty much the best one Canon makes. I think Jason has the Sigma (right J?), which I think is also f/2.8 or something very close to that. My macro is pretty fast (to me at least) but I think the biggest problem is my attempts at macro work have been in very slight shade. I guess I need to look for things in bright, direct sunlight. I'll look more closely at what lenses others are using from now on--thanks for the advice!

Yes, this was taken with the Sigma 70mm f2.8 macro...thanks for stopping in and looking Rachel. Tyler, check your site...that'll be $2.8 kabillion please (in rubles...LOL)

nice capture and great color