Hover Fly

Quiet chuffed with this one.



Hand held, *ist D, SMC-A 100mm f2.8 Macro, AF-360FGZ, 1/750s, f/16.0, iso200, approx 50% center crop.

Quite chuffed?!? It's bloody marvellous!!

I agree with Daniel, nice one!

My first reaction was to look at your camera settings and see if you could have got a better DOF, but I decided that even at f32 you'd have been hard pushed to get it all pin sharp. As it stands I think you chose the best option, concentrating on the head.

Did you use the AF-360FGZ off camera? and did you leave it on auto?
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Hard as I try to be critical . . . I can't. Excellent composition & 'pose', lighting looks great too.

I'd like to know a bit more about the lighting you used, apart from the model number of the flash I mean. Did you use full or reduced power, manual or P-TTL, bounce or direct, diffuser ?

Thanks fpr the comments guys, apprieciated.

AF-360FGZ on camera (can't get the bloody thing to work in wireless mode now for some reason, maybe because I dropped it) set to P-TTL and high speed sync, camera was set in maual mode (I'm pretty sure these were the settings).

Yep - an excellent shot
Andy

But it is not hovering!

Sensational photo btw.

What, hovering like this?




istD, Sigma 105mm f/2.8 @ f/13, Manual Focus (preset then waived in front of hovering hoverfly), manual flash - Centon FG30 with diffuser. Cropped down to approx 1/4 of the frame.

This one worked, many didn't!

But nowhere near as sharp as Brian's.

Dan

still pretty damn good though!

I couldn't find any hover flies but found this beauty clinging to the wall of my room. Picture is contrived, not accidental, but the model seemed very compliant.
To give it some scale, the lens is a 12-24mm DA with a 77mm filter.




*istD, Vivitar Series 1 70-200 Macro, AF500FTZ + Stofen, f8, 1/125, Iso 200 AWB

Great Shots.

Hehe!! macro is fun when you have nice bugs around, gonna try and set a focus trap this weekend, see if I can match Dan's excellent shot.

Peter, that bug would feed my cat for a week, pity Scotland is so cold and damp, bugs that size never come this far north.

Brian,

It was rather magnificent. The only thing that really surprised me was the relatively tiny size of its eyes but hey, it made up for it in the ear department After a while of just sitting on my lens it seemed to get quite comfortable and folded its antennae around the side of its head and under its wings. Fascinating creature.

I have an aunt who is absolutely terrified of moths . . . but I couldn't be that cruel . . . to the moth

I only wished I'd had my SMCP-FA 100mm macro lens and the incredible AF140C (thanks for that) with me but I think the Vivitar did a pretty good job and I'm quite pleased with the lighting anyway.

Cheers,

Hi Brian,

That shot was taken by focusing the lens to about 12 inches, holding the camera at arms length, looking out for a hovering hoverfly and approaching as quickly as possible, then guessing when the hoverfly was in focus and taking the shot.

Just so you can see the results you can get with this method, here are a few more...














'twas a lot of fun, highly recommended.

Dan

OK, so how may shots did it take to get the "perfect" one?

I think I was lucky - only about 40. There was one more than was nearly as sharp. But it was a pleasant afternoon spent in a Welsh cottage garden when we were on holiday back in June, so I didn't mind one bit, I could happily have taken 100.

I wouldn't call it a perfect one either, by any means - the crop I've done is the bottom right hand corner of the frame, so compositionally speaking, it was quite poor.

Dan