[olaxip]

Wasp (i think) not great but my first attempt. Any tips for doing this type of photography are most welcome. As it was sunny this afternoon i decided to sit in the garden with my camera and try my hand at a few close up shots when i noticed these hovering (wasps ?)

After many, many attempts i gave up and this was my best result. I would love some advice on how/where im going wrong and how i could improve. Do i need a better lens, or macro filter, how do you guys catch these things with such sharpness. Im not after mirracles first time but would love to know how i could improve my chances with these types of photographs.

I have included all the shooting info so you can tell me how to improve

canon 30d with 70-200 f/4L
opened with cs3
cropped from 2.32 mb image @3504 x 2336 down to 6inch x 4 inch
Sharpen, more accurate box checked
Gaussian blur
radius 9.1 pixels
amount 29%

manual exposure
1/250
7.1
spot metering
iso 400
lens ef70-200mm f/4L
focal length 200mm
image quality fine
flash on
shutter curtain 1st curtain sync ?
white balance daylight
manual focusing
picture style standard
sharpness 4
color space srgb

[stepheno]

IMO it is a hoverfly. Any amount of post processing is not going to make the image any sharper. As you have said it is a crop and it shows in the amount of noise.

At 200mm I think the lens will show some softness and from the exif I notice you have used manual focus - handshake? With a 30D and 70-200 in sunlight I would let AF find it. Maybe no flash and a faster shutter speed would have been better - maybe 1/500. I don't know the minimum focussing distance of that lens but a macro lens (eg 100mm f2.8) will allow you to get up close to the bug and really fill the frame, then you won't need to crop. HTH

[AQ]

That is not an easy subject. You could try what I have seen done by pros.

Catch one.
Put some glue on a stick and attach inscet.
Position for shot and sort out background.
Use a fan to blow air directly onto it.
It thinks it should be flying and flaps its wings.
Take perfectly focused pictures
Use photoshop to touch out stick etc.

I kid you not

[Rob Barron]

When you cropped this, you should have cropped by pixel size, not by physical size. What I mean by that is if you wanted a shot that is 6 x 4" on here, you should have sized it at 432pixels x 288pixels. As your monitor (assuming Windows not a Mac) is roughly 72 dots per inch, that will show at that size.

If you took a high res photo (300dpi) and cropped it to 6x4" but still at 300 dpi, it will actually be 1800 pixels by 1200 pixels. This will display on a computer screen as huge!

In this case I note you have actually saved it as 1000 x 667pixels. If you divide those by 72, you will find it displays as 13.88" x 9.26", a lot larger than you ntended and clearly too large for the subject here which is therefore looking over-enlarged.

I hope that hasn't confused you, suffice to summarise by saying when resizing to display on the computer/internet, think ONLY about the size in pixels as this is how a computer displays images.

In this case, I think had you displayed this photo a lot smaller, it would look sharper than it does on here. Worth having a look at your original again and seeing if you can produce something a bit sharper. Obviously if the original is not sharp then you can't make it sharp now but if the original is better, you could show it on here closer to its original quality

Hope that helps,
Rob

[olaxip]

Thank you

I like Anthraquinone's idea a bit cruel but there are millions more of the annoying little bugs and 1 or 2 gone missing wont harm the world will it.

Rob Barron i just get lost.....so lost when it comes to resizing i just know that pixalo only allows pics to be no more than 300kb and 1000pix wide so i open with cs3 and reduce size to about 900 then save for web and drag the quality slider down intil it gets under the 300kb size.

I just dont get my head around the percent pixels for instance if i open a shot which is on my desktop in cs3 and click image, up pops the box i then have pixel dimesions which says 1.62m ? dont know why it says this as my picture is 476kb. I then have a drop down box which can adjust the image in pixels or percent again i dont understand the difference. Below is a further box which has 3 options, width, height and resolution now the width and height can be changed by percent, inches, cm, mm, points or picas and the resolution can be changed by pixels/inch or pixels by cm

I believe this all changes again when sizing for computer or for printing and i believe the industry standard for printing is 300dpi or is that ppi and for computer its 72 dpi or ppi. If this is the case i wonder why we dont just have a 72 dpi/ppi and a 300 dpi/ppi check box as whats the need for 96dpi/ppi or indeed any other number

Also we have scale styles, constrain proportions (which i think i understand keeps everything relative) and resample image. Again im lost with these. Also i dont know what the bicubic, bilinear, nearest neighbor, bicubic smoother and bicubic sharper options do

As you can probably guess im a little bit confused over resing and pixels/dimensions/document sizes/ etc

Any advice or links on resizing images the correct way i would welcome

gives me a headache just trying to explain it never mind learn it

[silkstone]

One of the most difficult things is to get the exposure right. Many insects have shiny bits that reflect the light, and flowers can have strong colours which easily blow the red channel. It's usually better to underexpose and then boost shadows - that also means you can use a faster shutter speed.



Resizing etc...

A JPEG is compressed so the filesize will be less than the size in RAM when displayed. If it's an 8-bit image (i.e. each channel - red, green, blue - uses 8 bits of data) there will be 3 x 8 = 24 bits of data for each pixel. If there are 10 million pixels, all these will use 240,000,000 bits (240 Megabits or Mb). There are 8 bits in a byte, so this image will use 240/8 = 30 Megabytes (MB).

So an 8-bit uncompressed TIFF from a 10 Megapixel camera will have a filesize of 30MB. A JPEG will be smaller but will still occupy 30MB of RAM when uncompressed and displayed.

When resizing, just decide on the number of pixels you want to display in the longest dimension. Use your favourite image editor, enter this value in the Resize dialogue, select bicubic interpolation (that is usually the default), make sure you tick the box to maintain aspect ratio, and away you go.

[Markulous]

Can only suggest how I started shooting macroes, which was taking things one step at a time. So, I'd go for static subject, preferably a tripod (so you can stay at reasonable ISO, a slow shutter and no flash) and work up from there

This taken on a grey dismal day (it even drizzled a bit) - but no flash, so no bright highlights from flash or sun!

[Rob Barron]

Olaxip (fun name BTW, I could have put my name backwards but that would make me a Bor and too many regs on here would have agreed with it! <g>), the resolution is irrelevant when you are showing on a computer as the computer decides the resolution by default!

It is a mistake to think there is only a need for two resolutions (72 & 300dpi). 96dpi is used on Macs. But that is still only the start of i. Whilst 300 dpi is the optimum res for a photograph, if you print it larger you can go down in res. For example, an A4 print, generally viewed at not much less than arms length, will look equally good at abut 240dpi. Print an A3+ poster which is viewed from maybe 4 feet away and you can get down as low as 150-170dpi and still see a quality image.

The thing to do for your pics here is to size as you want in pixels, I usually go for about 800 pixels wide (some people struggle to get 1000 pixels images fully on their monitors) and then use Save For Web to get the best compression to size it appropriately. I recommend you hit 'Save For Web', ensure you are using jpg and then click on the little triangle above 'Optimised' and select 'Optimise for file size...'

This brings up a window in which you can just put the max file size, I recommend you use 290kbs, and it will compress just enough to make a file as close to 290kbs and you save it by whatever name you want. That will get you the best quality for the file size you want and shuld easily give you a sharp image that looks good on the internet. I also recommend you use sRGB as the colour profile. You can check/change this by clicking on EDT > CONVERT TO PROFILE...

Mark's picture above (lovely shot Mark!) is sized to 800pixels width and looks good but is only 195Kbs so you can see it is very posible to get the file size under the limit with no worries about loss of quality.

BTW, ignore the file size shown in Image Size as this is irrelevant for this particular purpose.

Hope that all makes sense.
Cheers,
Rob

[chrisa]

I'd suggest taking macro shots a step at a time too as Markulous suggests. Though I will admit to prefering to use flash on these critters, especially if they are in flight.

There's also a clue in silkstones image in capturing bees etc in flight, and that's to setup near a plant they like to visit and then snapping it. Flash will help to freeze the insect in flight.

Some good bug advice marco tips can be found in this article Plonsky - Macrophotography Article

and this one too. Beautiful Bugs: How to Do Macro Insect Photography

[Soupdragon]

Originally Posted by Markulous

Can only suggest how I started shooting macroes,

Are they like Cod roes but smaller?

[Soupdragon]

I have tried on many occassions to photograph insects in flight but with little success.

My best advice would be:
Get a chair and sit in the garden on a nice day and gun the shutter at anything that flies (no pun intended that time)

[Markulous]

Originally Posted by Soupdragon

Are they like Cod roes but smaller?

Is there an echo in here?

OK, Mr Pedant. Macros (and I knows it is 'cos I looked it up! Eventually! )

[Soupdragon]

Sorry!