Wasps and a fly on fatsia flowers

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Nick
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I have not had much success this year finding insects, spiders etc to photograph. Imagine my surprise when today while gardening I noticed there were a lot of wasps and flies on a fatsia plant which is in flower at the moment. I rushed in to get my FZ330, which is rigged with a Raynox 150 and KX800 flash for this size of subject.

When I got back there was a butterfly on the fatsia. I don't see butterflies very often, and hardly at all this year. But I blew this opportunity. The FZ330 wasn't set up for it and I had a choice of taking off the Raynox or going indoors (10 metres or so) and a grabbing another camera that was ready to go, which is what I did. Too late. The butterfly flew off as I came back.

So I turned to the wasps and flies. I was out of practice and slow to get into the swing of it. And I was making mistakes. One was to have the flash level too high. The fatsia flowers blew very easily but when I turned the power down to avoid that I was concerned that the wasps and flies (some of which were very dark) would not have enough light to make a decent shot out of. So I decided to turn the power back up a stop and let the flowers blow a little. When I came to process the images I realised that was a mistake. I should have followed my usual procedure of avoiding blown highlights and making do with whatever I was left with.

Another mistake was to go too close in, resulting in wings being cut off by the edge of the frame. After a while I moved out a bit to try to keep the whole insects in the frame, but at that point it started raining. There were no more insects on the fatsia for the rest of the day.

FWIW, here are some of the images, warts and all. The raw files were batch processed in DXO PhotoLab, Silkypix and Lightroom, with some image-specific adjustments in Lightroom.

#1

1397 01 2018_11_12 P1560286_DxO SP7 LR7 1400h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#2

1397 09 2018_11_12 P1560308_DxO SP7 LR7 1400h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#3

1397 07 2018_11_12 P1560303_DxO SP7 LR7 1400h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#4

1397 08 2018_11_12 P1560305_DxO SP7 LR7 1400h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#5

1397 11 2018_11_12 P1560312_DxO SP7 LR7 1400h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#6

1397 25 2018_11_12 P1560346_DxO SP7 LR7 1400h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#7

1397 26 2018_11_12 P1560347_DxO SP7 LR7 1400h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#8

+1397 27 2018_11_12 P1560348_DxO SP7 LR7 1400h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
 
Hi Nick, nice to see you posting on here again, these don`t look too shabby imo although I know that you probably binned a couple of hundred just to get 7 or so descent ones that are acceptable to your eyes.
I like them all and always worth seeing more.
 
Hi Nick, nice to see you posting on here again, these don`t look too shabby imo although I know that you probably binned a couple of hundred just to get 7 or so descent ones that are acceptable to your eyes.
I like them all and always worth seeing more.

Thanks Graham. One of the reasons I haven't been posting much is that I've been spending a lot of time experimenting with a Sony A7ii. There is a very good offer on it here at the moment and for quite a while now I have wanted to see whether I could make better (more pleasing to my eye) close-ups of flowers etc using full frame. I have found the results of my experiments so far rather surprising, and not a little disappointing. As my conclusions firm up I'll probably write it up in my journey thread. This thread at dpreview gives a fair idea of where I'm at with this. I've done a lot more comparisons since then but the overall results are similar for the most part.

As to numbers binned, because of the rain cutting off the session I shot a lot fewer than usual, 77 in all. I kept 29 (they are in this album at Flickr). This means I kept almost 40% of them, which is an unusually high proportion (for me at least, it most often being in the 5% to - on a very good day - 10% or sometimes a little higher perhaps). I think this decision to keep a lot of them is reflected in the number with cut off wings, blown highlights and some other issues. I should probably have only kept a handful, but it has been so long since I photographed any invertebrates that it was nice to feel that I had a few in the bag, even if some of them are not so good.
 
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It`s always good to keep your finger in the pie and it was a well worth it time spent session.
 
Nice set Nick, glad to see you soon got back to your usual quality.

Thanks Andrew. They were there again today and I had another go, this time being more careful about the exposure and the framing. I haven't looked through them yet but I'm hoping they will turn out a bit better.

Nice work Nick

Thanks Alf. I'm a bit rusty with insects. It flowed better today. As to whether the results will be any better ... we'll see. You know how it goes - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and (to me at least) if isn't apparent which of those it is until I've worked through the images. What I see at the time on the LCD can be very misleading.
 
All excellent shots of great insects but I particularly like 2,3 and 5.

Dave

Also a good illustration of what a good plant the Fatsia is - great architecture and flowing at an otherwise pretty flowerless time of the year.
 
All excellent shots of great insects but I particularly like 2,3 and 5.

Thanks Dave. I captured almost 1000 more shots of them yesterday in-between gardening tasks with the wife, hopefully correcting some mistakes I made with this lot - over-exposure killing the ? anthers, trying to compose too near the edge of the frame and because of that getting parts of subjects cut off by the edge, and not using a slower shutter speed to give a bit more life to the backgrounds.

Also a good illustration of what a good plant the Fatsia is - great architecture and flowing at an otherwise pretty flowerless time of the year.

Yes indeed. And its big leaves move wonderfully in the breeze (which we have a lot of here).
 
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