Leaf Beetle

This tiny Leaf Beetle only measures 5mm and I was delighted to have found him in the garden. Because the beatle was so active I stuck to 2X on MP-E. The white wooly leaf that he sits on is called Lamb's Tongue.

nice ones Alex, this is a hard beetle to capture and diffuse. great composition and focus on the 1st image,here is a tip, you should reduce the contrast in post and increase the exposure a little. I know you dont have IMAGE EDITING OK , however I took your image and did very small adjustment in photo shop to show you what I mean. with the original image you should be able to recover much more than I did, if you like turn on IMAGE EDITING OK on your profile and I will post it

cheers!
A

Thanks for the tip, Andres. I've now turned on image editing and look forward to your post.

some great advice there alex,from an expert at photoshop.
they are a tough one to diffuse for sure.

here it is alex, you can see how the contrast reduction brings out light from underneath, plus the boost of exposure. as I said before with the original image you should be able to recover much more than I did, with the small JPG

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That's much better, Andres. Your tweaks have certainly helped to bring out the shadow details. I'll have a go with the original RAW file and thanks very much for sharing your expertise.

very nice photos

Lovely captures
Brian v.

If you use lightroom you can push the shadow slider to reveal detail there. but sometimes it works better to use the brush and increase the exposure just in that area, specially if you background is dark and the global shadow increase will reveal stuff on that background you don't need.

alquimista edition is very good, I would only add a bit more saturation to compensate the decrease on global contrast.

Comments much appreciated. Paulo, thanks for your suggestions. I will experiment.

With the combination of Andres' and Paulo's advice I should be able to reach a solution that brings out the shadow detail without introducing blown highlights.

the shadow slider on lightroom only adds light to the shadow areas, it doesn't touch your highlights, there's a separate slider for that (I think you'll guess the name)

PS: you can do all this on photoshop with the camera raw, its the same engine.