A successful weekend
This weekend one of my friends was nice enough to let me use his 40D to take pictures during several Halloween parties. Saturday and Sunday mornings, I decided to get a few macro pictures in, as the current estimates say I won’t have the 5D Mark II until the end of the month.
I took this shot of a very patient fly, though I was a bit heartbroken that it took off just after this and I might have been able to get the shot off. Still, I don’t think this one is so bad.
The post processing may be a bit much on this shot. What do you think? I had to edit the JPG because I haven’t downloaded the latest Adobe Camera RAW that supports the 40D and I don’t have Canon’s RAW converter installed. When I buy Photoshop CS4 I’ll be able to edit this better.
One thing that struck me was how spoiled I am with RAW. Only after going back to JPG do you realize how much less dynamic range it has. I also think the camera did too much processing of the JPG, resulting in some rather ugly banding that I tried to fix. On my old 5D I turned all processing off.
Harvestmen make excellent subjects because they rarely run away – unlike many garden spiders (though note that the harvestman is not a spider). I liked the arrangement of the legs on the cinder block, and tried to capture that in this image. This shot probably would have been better with the 180L but I didn’t feel like going back into the house and changing the lens.
I was very tempted to move the top leg on the right just a little bit up in order to be symmetrical, but in general I am against doing changes like those.
I cropped this shot a bit in order to deliberately place the leafhopper in the middle of it. Leafhoppers are one of my favorite subjects because they are so brightly colored. This one appears to be of the ‘army soldier’ variety.
I think I will revisit the post processing of all of these shots when I buy CS4, but in the meantime I think it was a very successful weekend in terms of photography.
Related posts:
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Tags: arachnid, fly, harvestman, insect, leafhopper, macro, photography, post processing