jjacovelli

One of my favorite places in my home state.  Was swarming with people while I was trying to shoot.  Will have to return on another day when conditions may be a bit better and the people a lot fewer.

Great capture Richard.  LOVE the slight ruffling of the feathers on his head... makes the shot for me.  Background nicely blown out but still "interesting".  I do wish the sunlit tree trunk on picture right wasn't so glaringly bright.  Don't know what kind of crop you already have on the pic but did you try anything where you eliminated that? 

I think it's too big to be that... these are pretty sizeable.  They hang with generic "black bird" flock in the area... red-wings, brown-headed cowbirds, and grackles. 

I've been very pleased with the performance of the Sigma so far.  Obviously, it's not 2.8 prime, but it also costs a small fraction of what one of those would cost. 

Found this dead hornet in my garage and decided it would make good test subject for macro/lighting/focus stacking experimentation. He's been laying in corner of the garage since last summer/fall so is in pretty bad shape.  Best viewed large

Thanks Wayne.  I had taken some photos of a grackle hanging around the feeder on a sunny day.  They have great iridescent colors in the sun.  This was taken on a cloudy day and I have to say I love the way they appear under this condition better than in full sun.

Richard,

I love your bird shots but this is one of my favs.  The coloring and position of the bird are great and it has a nice, non-distracting background.  Great work! 

Jason

Best viewed in large size.

I cropped that way because the area around that wing tip was a little "cluttered" I thought. Didn't like the wing cutoff but wanted attention on dragon fly face/body and not the "clutter". I'm including a different crop which I also did an "auto levels" on in Gimp.

Daniele,

 

The dragon fly was probably 3 inches long or so. I too was displeased with some of my first macro-type shots from the D70 with the kit lens. Before the D70 I had an ANCIENT Minolta 35mm which was STRICTLY no frills... no autofocus... had metering but only aperture priority and no true manual setting, etc. For my first macros with the new setup, I was shooting at F4.5 with autofocus on. For the latest shots, I used F8-F10 and purely manual focus. I could get REALLY close to subjects? a lot closer than when AF was on. The big issue is that the focusing screen is so small that it is really hard to determine when you are in sharp focus. I had many shots that looked in focus when I took them but blown up, the target was not sharp. I shot about 60 frames yesterday and only about 20 were in really sharp focus. I have taken in both large, fine jpeg and RAW. The shot you commented on started as a RAW. To be honest, I can?t tell a whole lot of different between the high end jpegs and the RAW shots from this camera. You can do more manipulation with the RAW images because you have more information with which to work, but if the original is a good quality image and doesn?t require much ?cleaning up?, the jpegs work great for me. Hope all this helps.

Taken yesterday.... only modification is cropping. Would appreciate

comments on any changes to improve image.

Shot on a recent summer afternoon at a park swarming with

dragonflies. This is my fav because of the dragonfly's "face".

I kind of like the sky... looks kind of like a painting. The streetlamp(??) at the bottom is VERY distracting. I would definitely crop the bottom of the image.

Too much contrast between the sunny area on right and the shaded foreground/left side.

Fairly interesting picture. Like the lighting in the trees and on the gate itself. A couple of issues though. First, the lights in the plants on the left of the image are WAY too bright for the rest of the pic. Between the intensity and the square shape of whatever they are lining, it is very distracting. I know you couldn't control their shape/intensity but is there some way you could fram the shot without them being included? Maybe shift your vantage point to image-left and shooting back toward's image-right? Second, is the lighting on the sides of the gate different colors in real life? Don't like he greenish tint on the right side.

Pretty good pic. Would like to see a little more lighht on the guys face... it's very dark compared to the rest of the picture and is distracting to me.