Hoverfly... I think?

It be a hoverfly Nice shot, still slightly soft, but the lighting is very nice and even, well done. I'm not too sure on the distracting green bladfe of grass on the right hand side of the frame, and also the Hoverfly is centrally placed, not sure it helps the composition of the image (I'm bad for central composition images myself so I can't talk!).

I had a small play with cropping and some sharpening/contrast/sa​turation adjustments, hope you like.

Dave

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That looks really nice,
may i ask how you got it to tilt like that?
and i noticed the soft feel. But i just cant seem to get that SUPER crisp look of alot of the macros on this forum

Looks like your shooting most of your shots in natural light (nothing wrong with that!), but something like f2.8, ISO 100. Try upping the ISO to 400, and the f stop to f5.6. If you can do ISO 800/f8, even better. Macro shots take a fair bit of practice to get down pat, so you may even have some camera shake induced by just not holding the camera steady enough. Don't panic, it just takes time to get it altogether.

As to the tilt, I used the crop tool in Photoshop CS2, it allows you to grab the corners and rotate the cropping area. I had a tiny bit of that green background OOF leaf on the right hand corner, so I cloned it out, selected the area and added some gaussian blur (0.3 pixels), and then some noise (0.3%) to make the area look more natural after cloning. I then did some minor adjustments to contrast (-1) and saturation (+3 from memory). Then converted to LAB mode, did my smart sharpening on the lightness channel, re-converted back to RGB mode and voila. Then did a quick run of Neat Image (default settings) over the image. Nothing fancy. You don't have to convert to LAB mode for sharpening etc, it's just a technique that I use. Others have different sharpening techniques in these forums. Most just apply sharpness to the image as is, which I find introduces some haloing and fringing. I typically don't apply a lot of sharpness to my images, I find that it shows when you do.

Dave

Can anyone tell me if the hoverflys that most of you have come across are this small?