Fly Macro by dibbly dobbler, on Flickr

Thanks

Hmm. Mr. Dobbler seems to have glued the bar to the supporting stands - so I'll lower the standard a little with some faux semi-macro.

The back of my house faces south and west mainly so the bricks get quite warm if there is any sun of an afternoon and at this time of year, as things cool late afternoon, it proves quite attractive for some of the larger flying critters. Quite a few flies and bees as normal of course but now also a number of Red Admiral butterflies and quite a few Dragonflies too on a good day.

The trouble is they are wary of anything that moves and so tend to settle, if they settle, some way up the wall. Not ideal for macro shots really. So I thought I would see what I could get with the 70-200 on a 600D body and some drastic cropping. The result was some very interesting DoF challenges, some as yet unexplained apparent back focus concerns and a few other enlightening observations.

The minimum focus distance of the lens is 1.2 meters - so all of these are at least that far distant and in the case of the Dragonflies more like 6 to 8 or 10 feet in many cases. What you see as backgorund will be standard bricks and mortar mostly - the odd UPVC window or door to.

So, with that in mind ....


Bee.


Fly.


Dragonfly.


Almost camouflaged.


Bee cleaning its legs.


Dragonfly from a different angle.


Nearly got all the wings sharp!


Red Admiral butterfly.


Dragonfly again, standing away from wall.


Fly.


Another dragonfly.


Red Admiral butterfly displaying proboscis.


As above. It sat there for quite a while displaying what it could do with its proboscis.

ETA:

A more macro like crop from the previous shot. Thats at 100%. Looks OK before conversion to jpg but has lost some detail along the way to appearing here. Thinking about it it has probably been upscaled a bit to not really 100% but a bit more. I'll see if I can fix that.


Dragonfly with invisible wings.


Red Admiral sitting 1 brick below an upstairs window frame - gives some idea of the degree of crop involved.


You can just about see all the wings in this one.


An attempt at PP to give some colour separation. Hmm. The wings are quite clear though.

A couple of observations.

The light faded a bit and I decided that I needed to up the ISO rather than attempt to hand hold pointing upwards and hope that the IS would deal with any wobbling. (I suspect IS slightly reduces clarity and was expecting to crop very deeply so it was a concern). As it turned out at this level of crop the difference in resolution between ISO 100 and ISO 400 can be seen although noise is not really a factor.

Following on from that - to try and claw back some of the resolution where it seemed necessary I removed all NR (a gentle default value set in Capture One)and set some rather radically low values for Radius and Threshold when sharpening. That seemed to help.

Apologies for being picture AND text heavy but hopefully the rather variable results will be of interest and maybe generate a few ideas. Comments welcome of course - and yes one or two of the above are a tad dark but mostly there was a reason at the time.

Good work and I totally agree with the comments.

It didn't help that visitors tended to be much the same colour as the brickwork especially n the warm light of a late afternoon sun. I rather suspect that the camera view of the focus area contained more backgrond than subject on many of them, hence the difficulty obtaining a good focus. It's an interesting challenge.

If the opportunity arises (won't be today, it's dull and grey with persistent rain so far) I may eperiment with my 400D to see how much difference the 10Mpix sensor makes compared to the 18Mpx on the 600D. Maybe not much for most of the Dragonfly shots with the full wing span but I suspect quite a bit of difference for the smaller beasties and the finer details. The 'fur' in the back of the bee and the Red Admirals is right on the boundary of resolving power.

The wall as a backdrop is far from ideal but at least it attracts the critters and they tend to stay quite still while enjoying the warmth. The texture also provides a clear indication of the plane of focus which, due to shooting at some unusual angles, is not always exactly where one assumes it might be.

some of my favourites:



and possibly my favourite ever:



Desperately need to save for a new flash and macro lens, should have never sold them.

Bluebottle Close Up (1) by Dibbly Dobbler, on Flickr


Bluebottle Close Up (2) by Dibbly Dobbler, on Flickr

+1

Guuuuurrll!! Formerly Stiglet80

This is my recent rubbish attempt. I will post it now cos anything will look crap after them shots anyway


dragonfly16x12 by sj-stephenson, on Flickr

Oops! My apologies SJ

Nice Darter though

Wow Mike !

Enhanced (well) with your new toy?