We have an orange rendered wall in our back yard and when I walked passed I saw this insect (not sure what it is) eating this bee. Well, I thought of this challenge and ran to get my camera. How I wish I had a macro lense (or any descent lens) but I wasn't too unhappy with how this shot turned out.
I'm sure most people will expect this was set up and will recognise that it was not taken with a sharp camera /lens, plus being another bug shot, I don't think this will score too well. I feel it is worth at least a +6 but I doubt it will reach that. Time will tell.
Post challenge
Well, I was way off on my prediction with this shot. Although the photo looked okay to me and I thought it met the challenge I guess you shouldn’t try and do bug shots without a macro (or any decent) lens. I was planning to put this up for comments in the forum but I think I’ve bored people enough during the voting period. I thought my title might have been worth a couple of comments. Sigh…
I must say the wall looks quite red on my screen. The focus on the bugs are a bit soft, did you have the camera on a tripod? 1/40 sec may not be fast enough to get good handheld closeup shots. Me and my friend have started taking macro shots, and really, it is a difficult art to get the buggers nicely in focus, no matter what lens one uses. From what I've heard, that is the most critical aspect to get right. You should see us running around from bush to bush with a camera on it's tripod. Hilarious. I didn't buy a lens, bought the set of 3 Kenko tubes, they work brilliantly. I still have my arm and leg as well.
I think the biggest issue here is that robber flies are an oft used subject and any shot of one that you enter is going to be compared to all the work of others, Roz being one of them. Dragonflies are the same way- That got a 5.77 in a FS. If you don't elevate them to a very high level, you'll score par at best.
Something like this might have fared better. It could have been accomplished better from the full size image of course... I did this from a screen capture of your entry.
As for the shot itself, I bet it would have done a lot better if you had rotated it 90 degrees clockwise. and used a gradient to darken what would become the foreground wood. I will take a stab at it...
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