Hi Kev, it's great to see someone else who is into photographing flies; they are one of my favourite subjects.
There is a
Campaign for Critique thread going on at the moment. One of the things to come out of that is the suggestion that to get constructive comments (as I like to call it), it is best not to post too many images at once. Six, it seems, is generally regarded as too many. One or two may be best. I don't know, I'm feeling my way in this forum at the moment, but that's what I've been reading.
Anyway, five flies and a woodlouse. Nice. There is plenty of personal preference stuff coming up; but just because I prefer something doesn't mean I think you should too! Please bear that in mind.
I see you used flash for all of these. That seems to be working well, with no nasty hotspots. That's good. May I ask what flash setup you are using, and what diffusion?
Achieving focus can be tricky with close-ups, but in each of these (with the possible exception of the woodlouse) you have part of the subject in good, sharp focus.
I wonder, how are you focusing? (Autofocus or manual focus, and if manual focus are you using the focus ring on the lens or keeping the focus fixed and moving back and forth to find focus?)
Then there is a question of where the plane of focus is falling on the subject, and how big it is (the “dof”). Take #1 for example. It is usually considered a good idea to have the head, and especially the eyes in focus, which isn't the case here. And the band that is in focus is fairly narrow. This raises the question of what aperture you used (it doesn't appear in the Exif data) and cropping (none has been cropped by the look of the image sizes). A relatively small aperture will produce a relatively large dof, and if the image is captured from further away and cropped this will give greater dof, but both will reduce the sharpness/detail in the image. We can discuss that trade-off in more detail if you like. There are widely differing views on how best to handle it. (btw, was the fly in #1 on a vertical surface, and captured from below, or has the image been rotated through 90 degrees?)
The head and the antennae look nicely in focus in #2, but the plane of focus confuses me. It looks like there are some areas near the camera that are in focus (on the near side legs, the nearest edge of the near wing, and the underside of the forward projecting leaf), and then some areas further away which are not in focus (the near side of the abdomen and the base of the near wing), and then further away again there is more in focus, (the hairs on the far side of the abdomen and part of the far wing). It is almost as if this is a stack with a part “missing” in the middle. I think I must be misinterpreting the geometry.
In #3 the nearest plane of the nearest eye is nicely in focus, but the rest of that eye is a bit dark so it doesn't matter I suppose whether it is in focus or not. Personally, I'd prefer to be able to see it better.
It is a purely personal preference of mine to get parts of the subject nearest the camera in focus as far as is practical, so the focus falls off on the far side of the subject, which seems more natural to my eye. So for my taste it would be nice if the near wing was more in focus (they are beautiful structures of course, and can catch the light delightfully sometimes). However, I don't think you had enough dof to achieve that with the technique you were using.
For my taste the focus and dof placement works best in #4, The head, abdomen, upper front and middle near legs and base of the wing are all within the dof. I like that. Not so keen on the darkness of the underside, where there is little detail/texture visible. That makes me wonder about what post processing you are doing, and whether you are shooting RAW or JPEG.
As in #3, in #5 the nearest face of the eye is nicely in focus (as you can see looking at the full size image, which it great to have access to by the way), but the rest of the eye isn't, and nor is the rest of the head. My preference would be to have the centre of dof shifted slightly further back so the head came into sharper view.
I'm not sure anything is fully in focus in #6. I notice that as with the others you used flash, but in this case you used 1/40 sec rather than the 1/200 sec you used for all the flies. I'm wondering what your thinking was regarding the shutter speed for this one. (That's not a criticism by the way – I sometimes use much slower exposures even when using flash.)
The 1/40 sec exposure also raises issues about whether you are using any sort of support for the camera (I'm thinking not just of damping down camera movement when using slow shutter speeds hand-held, but also how the use of some support can assist with framing a shot, and letting you take multiple shots with the same or very similar framing.)
Another personal preference – by and large I prefer subjects' heads to be visible, which of course it isn't in #6. (Woodlice have nice antennae too, which I like to capture if I can.)
As to composition, apart from the woodlouse the compositions are all fairly central laterally, and the hoverfly is vertically quite central too. It's another taste thing, but unless a subject is filling a very large proportion of the frame I tend to prefer some asymmetry, with the subject looking/moving into the picture rather than out of it.
Like I said, lots of personal preference here, so please take or leave according to your preferences, which is obviously what matters here because these are your images.
I'll be happy to discuss any of this or related stuff if you would like to.
