Brown Agus. Comments please (1 Viewer)

Took what I thought were nice shots of a Brown Argus and a pair mating. Just wondered what anyone else thinks of them.

They were taken on a Fuji S5000.

Excellent shots!
My only criticism would be that i would like to see them cropped a bit tighter to remove some of the background. Otherwise well done, & keep up the good work! B

I agree, very nice shots, but the cropping and composition could have used some help. Myself, I would have tried a somewhat narrow vertical composition/crop with both of these. Retaining some areas of the background that might be complimentary in hue and luminosity, but also placing the butterflies so that they are facing more into the center of the image. I know that people sometimes complain about the often suggested "rule of 3rds" composition, but there's a reason that it works more times than not.

For examples: On the first one I would have cropped it just to the outside of the out of focus blossom on the right of the butterfly, and to the inside of the blurry blossom on its left. I might have removed a bit from the bottom just so the butterfly wasn't so centered vertically. For the second photo I would have cropped it just to the outside of the brown blurs on the left, and cropped it close to the butterflies on the right, not far from that antenna that sticks out. Or it might even look better if you cropped it to the inside of those brown blurs, and also close to the butterfly's antenna on the right, for an even more vertical composition.

The right cropping and composition can take a photo from ho-hum to special.

I'm not sure about the close-focusing range on your camera when attempting to focus on subjects when zoomed-in during macro mode. Most zoomed-in lenses don't allow for a close-in focus. If that is the case with your lens, you might want to try using a telextender with a +1 & +2 (+3 total) or a +4 closeup lens behind it. This allows you to sharply focus in very tight to your subject with the zoom, while still giving you plenty of breathing room between your camera and the subject. Another up-side of using this arrangement is that it collapses your depth-of-field very much, allowing you to pull your subject out of busy backgrounds even better than you can do with the camera's lens alone. On my camera with a typical 1.7X telextender, and +3 or +4 worth of close-up lenses, I can take a tight shot of most butterflies from a distance of 2 to 4 ft. (If their image is too large to fit in the frame, take-off +1 or +2 close-up lenses.) This allows me to sneak up on many more subjects without interrupting their behavior or frightening them off. You can get that closer-crop in the camera, making full use of your camera's resolution, rather than losing much of it by cropping later on a smaller image area.

Keoeeit, thanks for the indepth reply. These pictures have not been edited in any way, other than to reduce the size inorder to upload them.

The main issue for me is that although I can use Photoshop quite well, I take pictures like these and then am unsure how to crop them, etc inorder to 'enhance' the image.

How about these cropped pictures taken at the same time. These have been cropped to try and capture a little more essence of the subject! Has it worked?

Yes, you're starting to get the idea. It's a good rule to try to match the framing of the subject in the same direction as your main subject. (not a hard & fast rule, but one that will work in most instances).

But in these I see one original problem, plus a new one or two.

You should have first started by straightening the images, by trying to use cues from the vertical growth of plants in the backgrounds, or as in the case of the child, trying to get him to stand with a vertical center of gravity.

Doing this first, you then find out that you'll lose some of the edges of your photo for cropping room. Usually it severly limits how much you can crop to keep things in a rectangular frame. (In the instance with the child, tilting the photo properly to begin with will make it difficult to keep the top of his head in the frame, but the angle is so distracting that you'll have to find a pleasing crop that will do just that. It won't be easy.)

One of the main errors I see in trying to crop for composition, is that you really like having the subject centered in the image. To you, that may look just right. But to others, it can make a photo boring or uninteresting in a short time. You have to give the viewer's eye something to entertain them. Your main subject should USUALLY be put a little off-center, towards one of the corners, and also trying to keep any cues of their direction of travel, or direction they are looking, facing INTO the image. You want to lead the viewer's eye and mind into your image, not out and away from it.

To be more clear, I'll try to use the 2 photos you just used for examples.

Butterly Photo: AFTER you have straightened the image somewhat (or cropped out any clues from the background that it is crooked), it would have looked nicer if you moved the butterfly to the left of center. So the butterfly was headed into the photo. If it was me, I would have cropped out more from the top and less from the bottom, but stilll kept that similar frame proportion. This would put the butterfly up and to the left. Using the stem of the plant to further emphasize the vertical composition.

Butterfly + Child: This one would be particularly hard to crop after straightening, because you will lose much of the top of the child's head. So rather than try to retain that, and show the "goof" (the goof being the error in taking the photo, not the child ), you might want to make an even tighter crop to just suggest child behind the butterfly. I'll take a stab at trying to crop both of these to better show what I'm trying to say.

(time passes while editing ... tick tock tick tock ...

After trying to get a pleasing crop out of these, I must say it was quite the challenge. Each of them lacked areas that were needed to find a pleasing composition.

In the first one I only used the image area that you had available (after straightening), in the second one it shows what could have been done if you had a little more foreground to work with. So I used a clone-brush to add that in.

The image with the child was particularly challenging, because you have 2 subjects, both looking in opposite directions. In the first example of that I removed the childs distracted gaze to bring attention to the butterfly only. In the 2nd example I included the child's gaze to show a more "artsy" photograph that might convey the feeling of children missing the point of being there sometimes. (or however you want to interpret that .

None of the crops and compositions that I tried would be, in my opinion, the best that can be done, but it shows what I'm trying to explain in the text a little better.

There are no cut and dried rules to cropping and composition but there are some valuable guide-lines that you can start with and progress from there. I think it's something you have to develop over time. One of those "you know it when you see it" kind of things. The hard part as a photographer trying to create that, is trying to see it before you know it -- that only comes with time.

Thankyou very much for your time and patience.

I guess the real hard task for me now is to try and take pictures with the wider composition in mind. All that would be running through my head at the time of taking these shots would be capturing a good clean image of the butterly, mainly to discuss identification later. I need to combine this with a sense of 'art', to get the clean shot that also looks pleasing and that I can later manipulate in to a good finish picture.

LOTS to think about.

Once again thanks for the comments. I am on Holiday soon, if I get any good shots I will try and post some up.

I hope that was helpful and not more confusing.

You're right though, you do have to keep a lot in mind when taking the photograph first. What helped me immensely was learning photography on film equipment. So I instinctively try to make every shot count, as if it will be the only one I'll ever get.

Often, I'll take several "artsy" shots with the camera first, paying attention to those details for composition, lighting, subject (not in that order). Then I'll take the more sterile identification shots, sometimes including something in the image to give the subject some size perspective. If I don't have an easy-to-read ruler handy to put in the frame, then I'll sometimes drop a coin or paper-currency into the photo, so there will be something later that I can use to measure the subject to. A dime on the side-top of a large mushroom for example, that sort of thing.

This was particularly effective when I dropped a $1 bill into a frame next to a wolf-print in the sand. The wolf's paw being as large as the length of the bill. It's one of my more favorite nature photos. A ruler alone would not have given such a blatant feeling of size and others viewing it can easily grasp what must have been the size and strength of that animal.

This is the wonderful thing about digital though, you are freed from the constraints of roll film and the exorbitant cost that that can cause if you shoot many frames.

Try many in-camera compositions while shooting, you have nothing to lose but some memory space that you can easily reclaim with the "delete" option.

Just keep shooting ... it'll eventually become second nature to you. Just like riding a bike, in time you no longer think about your balance. In photography you'll eventually no longer have to think to balance your composition too.