McGregNi wrote:
I may be helpful to think of it in more detail, so I've taken a closer look - hopefully any further discussion can be useful as there's plenty of images where these issues apply. As usual I'll lay out my thoughts directly as a start point

My own view on it is that the yellow on the white buildings is exaggerated - not caused by the sunlight, but by an overly warm artificially set colour temperature value. This is evidenced by the bleed off of yellow into the lower horizon, but with the cast continuing to the far distance which is actually very high altitude.

Interesingly in this lower sky area, where the exposure surges up towards the whitepoint, we see the same increase in yellow cast as we do on the brightest parts of the white buildings - you would expect the opposite as brightness shoots up towards pure white. Looking at the line of buildings on the pier, this pattern is repeated - it is only the brightest highlights that take on the yellow, with patches of building retaining white around that.

The predominant colour cast in the morning is blue. Warmer toned items near the ground would be saturated, true, but that's mainly caused by the low angle of light and the resulting depth of contrast across textures - not the actual colour temperature of the sunlight. It would boost any bright colour really.

It is probably the 'natural' saturation of the objects on the ground, but combined with an 'unnatural' too warm colour temperature setting, that has led to the very yellow seeweed and some of the stones and whites on the buildings.

Actually, on the beach itself, I agree that the tones are attractive (apart from the seeweed that I mentioned before). So my own suggestion would be to select off the pier and sky and cool that all down, getting nice whites and blues back, then work on the ground separately with less cooling, keeping all the nice natural saturation there.

davidstorm wrote:
I have to say that I think this comment is nonsensical! There is nothing 'soft' about this image and the crop is fine. It's a great shot and not easy to do, particularly with both tubes and a TC! I haven't tried this combination yet, may give it a go.

Well done Mike.

I disagree with this one too. The 100mm macro lens on its own would not be capable of producing anything close to this image. Yes, it would be sharp, but the magnification wouldn't be there and after cropping sufficiently to get the same size image of the fly, the quality would be poor. I think you should try this yourself anniem and post us your images so we can see what you can do with just a 100mm macro lens!

Regards
David

Snootchies wrote:
I couldn't disagree more. You have to appreciate that the focal plane is so terribly narrow here. Side-on, we get the majority of the head/torso/abdomen very sharp. And that's what you want. As parts of the fly come out of that focal plane, then they will become soft etc (such as the legs closest to the viewer).

Fairly soft isn't an attribute I'd give to the shot at all, as its the depth of field that's at work here, not a failure to focus correctly on the subject.