This little fellow didn't give much time to think about the shot. I had three chances before the butterfly flew away, this is one of them.

Tell me what you think, but careful.......I'm a bleeder...lol

dlc - Thanks for posting. I will give you my opinion - I am still really working on my photography, so my opinion is worth about what you paid for it...

I really like the subject matter. The yellow butterfly and flower really look great together. I think your point of focus is spot on - the head and top of wings is nicely in focus, which must have been a challenge given the subject. I also like the bokeh of the background.

Since this is the critique forum, I will give you three ideas that I think may help this shot.

1. It would be nice if you had a deeper depth of field. You will notice the front of the flower and butterfly are in focus, but the back of the wings are not. I do not know anything about the lighting conditions, ISO or the F stop you used, so do not know if you could have used a smaller f stop without introducing more movement of either the camera or subject.

2. I think the shot has an overall yellow tint - the flower yellow seems blown out, and the green in the background seems a little more yellow than it should. This would be easily adjusted in PP.

3. I would like to see the flower and butterfly a little less centered so my eye has some place to "go", and does not feel so stagnate. Either that or a really tight crop.

Great first post - I expect that if I had been there I would still be trying to figure out how to hold my camera when the butterfly flew away, and would have missed the shot entirely.

I hope this was helpful.

Dave

Thank you for taking the time to view the shot and give your opinion.

You say that you don't know the F-stop used, that makes two of us! This shot, taken days after getting the camera, was for a minute or two, a great shot. I barely knew how to turn the camera on. If I remember correctly, everything was on AUTO.

Now looking at it I see what you see. I try to save the bad and not so bad shots to remind myself what not to repeat. Although, sometimes that only works in theory. I have seen improvement but nothing earth shattering or anything to write home about.

I may not know how to correct the situation for the next shot but knowing what is wrong is half the battle. In this particular shot, I regret it being centered. I agree with you on depth of field but when the shot was taken, depth of field meant how far back does the corn grow.

I like the eye-catching yellow, but if you look at it long enough, you want some of your eye back. It is just too yellow. I didn't do PP on this, wanted to leave it warts and all to hopefully learn from it.

Hi Debbie,

Thanks for sharing! Butterflies make for great macro subject matter, but can be a real challenge without dedicated macro gear.

Looking first at your image and then seeing the EXIF data posted by George, it's pretty clear what's "wrong" with your image. Your camera's "sharpness" setting was set to "soft" and your f-stop set way too shallow at f5.6 - simply a function of the "auto" setting of your camera (on my screen the face of the butterfly is actually rather 'soft', seemingly a bit out of focus). Macro work absolutely requires "critical focus" and sharpness. Depth of field is more a function of your creativity - some images may employ a rather shallow depth of field to "highlight" a certain portion of the images, while others may call for much greater depth of field. I would thus shoot either in aperature priority mode or in manual for macro work. Your camera may even have a dedicated "macro mode".

Your overall composition is pretty good, especially since you did not crop the picture so tight as to not leave any room for post-processing/editing in PS.

Regards,

Holger

Thank you for taking the time to go over my shot. I intend to post another, hopefully with lessons learned. I will do my best to put everything into practice that I can siphon from this wonderful site.

I am well aware that I can not possible thank you enough for giving me part of your day. I realize that you are extremely busy people, most likely with better things to do than take a baby by the hand. I take your assistance seriously and hopefully that will show in the coming results.

The EXIF is the coolest thing. It intimidated me at first to see all the information posted, not knowing really how to decipher it. But proudly, I am getting there. I won't let your guidance be wasted.