paul_de_ley

Beautiful catch Tue! Did you take the shot near dawn or dusk = during "golden light" hours?

Minor quibble - on my screen the yellows look a little bit over saturated in the irdidescent parts of the plumage, maybe try tweaking color balance a little towards more blue/cyano, to bring out those color gradients more evenly?

Beautiful shot Václav! Very well done, I love the detail of trapped air bubbles on the nose

Love the symmetry Shu-Shin!

Spectacular catch in every way! One suggestion for post processing: in the large size photo some noise reduction artefacts show up on leg and wing, maybe lower NR settings can avoid those?

An odd fellow indeed Grayham, well caught! Did you shoot this in raw or jpg? If the former then you might be able to un-blow the highlights on neck and shoulders, your a700's cmos has plenty of dynamic range that might have gotten lopped off in jpg.

Beautiful colors, pose and sharpness! On the post processing side, the highlights along the right side and on the beak look a little too high-key on my screen, maybe try pushing down the bright end of the curve a little?

Well caught Rassie, and not an easy catch to make at 250mm! I like the slightly guilty-looking pose, but the composition looks a bit imbalanced as the bird is tilted or leaning forward a bit too close to the upper left of the frame. Perhaps a different crop would work best with a little more space on the top and left sides as well as a slightly closer cut along the bottom edge and on the right.

Hi Christopher, I see in the technical details that you shot this with a 100mm (macro lens?) focal length at f3, 1/160sec and iso 100. At close distances depth of focus is already extremely shallow, so most of the time you'd want to maximize it by using a narrower aperture and higher iso, for example in this case you could have shot at approximately the same shutter speed with iso 800 and f9 or so, resulting in a noticeably larger sharp area of the fly's wings & back. BTW this is technically not a horsefly but a blowfly known as the common greenbottle. Cheers - Paul

The prickly hairs on this fly are nice and sharp Václav, though to my taste the background is a bit too noisy (or too noise reduction artefact-y?). Also, the highlights on its back suggest a higher angle might have worked better in terms of lighting, and that would also have allowed the wings to become a more noticeable part of the composition.

Well spotted and well shot Chad! I really like the colors and placement of the "jack-a-lanche" and don't think this needs any improvements. But if you'd like to explore a bit more then you could for example try shooting this again with a much wider diaphragm (lower f number), and maybe apply some tricks to avoid your lens & camera reflecting in the round tips (for example cut a circle in a large white sheet of paper and make it just a little wider than the diameter of the front glass in your lens, then shoot through this mini window)

Great sharpness and color contrast Bill! Fred has chosen the perfect background to make his redness stand out even more. The only possible improvement I could possibly think of is that (on my monitor at least) the white balance looks a tiny bit off towards yellow tones so tweaking it to a slightly cooler setting might deepen Fred's reds even more.

What an amazing insect! Is this a pet, and if so how many of your fingers has it chopped off already? :)

I disagree slightly with Bruce though, the space and out of focus claws on the lower right tend to draw away my eye and/or make the composition feel just a tiny bit out of balance. Just a little tighter cropping on the right would make things truly perfect, I hope you don't mind that I try and show the slight difference with (to me at least) significant effect.

Lovely colors and composition, thanks for sharing this!

Beautiful action shot Javed! The trance-like closed eyes of the horse are an extra nice touch. Were there any distractions off the left side or would a slightly wider left margin work too?

Lovely shot Patty! The sharpness of the bubbles really emphasizes the speed of the others whirl. Now I want to jump in and play in the water too :)

In this case I think it's actually Mr Kite who fetched dinner for the

Missus Kite. Anyone for Vole Sushi? ;)

Great shot with lovely color transitions Arash! The larger spheres with many crater-like pockets really look planets or moons. The left half is very sharp while the right side is slightly more blurry, perhaps this was shot in a rounded glass/vase rather than a flat-sided vessel? If so then you might like to experiment more with a small fish tank or such to maximize (or just equalize) sharpness across the image.

Nice catch with smooth background blur Sreten! Wasps being what they are, this one might not just be curious but drinking a water drop, or even preparing to cheat by chewing through the base of the flower to get at any nectar before the bud opens.

Nice catch Saleem, reminds me of this series on photographyblogger.net! If your original full-size image was more centered it would be interesting to see different crops, for example showing more of both hands/arms instead of almost cropping them out. And if you're planning more experiments, another possible way you could go about it is to make the arms near invisible by having the balloon-holding and -popping assistant wear black gloves & something with black sleeves, and set up a light source from the opposite side.

Impressive pose with beautiful DOF and backlighting effect, seven thumbs up Tanni!

Please comment on the composition. I was actually hoping to catch a

pair of terns making a synchronized in-flight turn during courtship,

but instead these two came straight at me in an optically interesting

intersection of beaks and wings.

Thanks for the comments everyone! I must confess that as a kid back in Belgium I used to fatten up local orb weavers = Araneus diadematus aka the cross spider. This was by feeding them with crane flies in the fall just to see how big they could grow: about the size of a respectable raspberry.

But this ghoul-faced goliath is quite a bit larger than any of those ever got: its abdomen alone matched the size of my thumbnail. It's the first time I've seen this species since I moved continents though, so I have no idea if that's particularly big one for its kind.

Please view large if you don't mind seeing the spiny & hairy detail!

This quarter-sized orb weaver was lurking in a split branch of an oak

sapling, under dense shade so I shot from tripod with the camera set

to 2sec MLU release with f20 at 1.3sec and iso 800.

Nice catch of a shy bird Richard and especially a great pose emphasizing the streaming back feathers. In the mid size image the greens come out looking slightly unnatural (almost turquoise) on my screen, but in the large image the palette actually works out more nicely. Maybe try a very slight shift in the color balance away from cyan and into a teeny bit more red tone? It could well be that it's just my screen that doesn't calibrate very well.

Interesting concept but to my personal taste perhaps the manipulations (such as mirroring of the bird, compression of the knees to fit the legs in the right side clone, rays of light added in post processing) are a little too obvious. The creative idea might be better rendered by cloning in a different pose of the same bird from another shot in the same series, with more subtle light rays emanating from an asymmetrically placed point above?