Two Hovers - One on my hand, one in Flight

[IanClark]

Sphaerophoria Hover

Marmalade Hover

 

[PeteGreg]

Hi Ian, there is always something about your images that looks special, they have that extra sharpness/clarity to them, great work.
No1 like a lot, No2, you just can't beat one in flight, so hard to get in focus, again great work.

 

[IanClark]

Thank you Peter, I appreciate your comments


Regarding the clarity, a lot of that comes from the light. It's been tough to get the light to this point and there are still lots of improvements that can be made I feel.

I always of course try to get as sharp in focus an image as I can get but one of the important things I'm sure you know is post process sharpening. From what I've read, even when you have an L series lens, there are filters on the sensor that can reduce overall sharpness a little (if I'm completely incorrect on this I apologise) and RAW files do tend to look a touch softer than expected.

What I do then is apply selective sharpening in post processing to recover the level of sharpness I saw with my eye whilst trying to avoid over sharpening (which causes jaggies) - (not focus correction however, if the shot is OOF, it's binned).

Then I'll apply some noise reduction to just make everything look a touch more silky. These are steps that take less than a minute to do.

 

[Coop]

don't downplay Ian, there's only so much can be done with PP, imo everything you produce is gold out of the box, its all in the initial capture

 

[IanClark]

Thank you Ben, very kind of you to say.