Caught this guy flying around my dining room!? After a few minutes in the freezer, he was slow enough for me to photo. He survived the experience and I let hin go out side.
The flower is a Bachler Button from my wifes garden.
Shot in RAW format using 105mm Nikon Micro lens and an SB 600 flash.
Post processing-Crop,resize,Lab color gaussion blur,NI,saturate,burn.
Statistics
Place: 23 out of 487 Avg (all users): 6.6955 Avg (commenters): 8.2273 Avg (participants): 6.6238 Avg (non-participants): 7.1515 Views since voting: 4162 Views during voting: 335 Votes: 243 Comments: 26 Favorites: 7 (view)
Hello! I see that you haven't received any after-challenge comments, so here's one from the Critique Club.
Initial Thoughts
To be honest, my initial thought was, "I've seen this before". However, this shot, while popular (insect macros always are, especially wasps/bees), has a wonderfully original use of complementary colors in the purple and yellow, which one doesn't see so often. Another initial thought after, "I've seen this before." was, "but still, wow." :)
Composition / Content
I really like the composition in this shot. You've got the wasp itself centered instead of it's face, and this creates a nice strong triangular look between the wasp's head, and the branching of the flower. Having the wasp look directly into the camera is a little chilling, especially for those of us with phobias :) The content, while not unique, is still put forth extremely well.
Background
I can't find anything wrong with the background. It's nicely OOF, the color is good and complements the image well, and it isn't cluttered. Good job.
Camera Work - Technical
Focus is crisp, DOF is great, and the exposure is practically dead on. Your camera work is really nice.
Digital Processing
This photograph *looks* a little over smoothed. The antennae and the eyes just have a kind of "plastic" look. The color work you did is really nice, giving it a beautiful saturation, and you said you did a little burning, but it wasn't entirely noticeable to me at first, which is a sign of a good burn job.
Fits The Challenge
Being a Free Study makes this part easy on me, how can it not fit the challenge? :)
My Opinion on the Photo
An absolutely wonderful photograph, that got high marks from me in the challenge (9). As I said, I was put off a touch by the plastic look of the wasps eyes and antennae, but everything else was beautiful. This is a work to be proud of. *edit* Oh, and one last thing. I think that you may have suffered in voting a little bit, because of content. As I also said, people tend to see a lot of insect macros, and it probably played a part in voting.
Well... it didn't place nearly as high as I expected. But I see I wasn't alone! Congratulations anyway ... 23rd out of 488 is still right smack up there near the top!
Excellent macro!!! The colors are good in this photo... the purple and yellow really offset each other, although it seems the colors are maybe just a bit muted... like it was overcast or dusk.
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