Few moments before the snack...

[fmarek]

[Cyberspider]

the cat is a very good shot...i like it but the fly is not so good. When you taking pictures of insects and spiders, please think about the crop...try to get the insect parallel to the image sensor and check your deep of focus befor you take the image...

here you can see the focus is at the whole insect...


regards
markus

[rjlittlefield]

Ah, but take a closer look at the fly. There are sharply focused hairs on both ends -- the fly was parallel to the image sensor!

The main reason the damselfly is so much sharper than the housefly is just that the damsel is bigger.

DOF (depth of field) drops sharply with increasing magnification. In fact at the same f-number DOF drops as about 1/magnification squared. Shooting a subject that is 5X smaller gives you 25X less DOF to work with. That's measuring DOF in terms of mm. If you measure it as a fraction of subject size, the difference does not seem so extreme, but still DOF with respect to subject size varies as roughly 1/magnification.

For larger insects, aligning the subject parallel to the sensor works well.

But that approach is less effective with smaller insects / higher magnifications. The DOF may not be enough to cover even the front half of the body.

At higher magnifications like the fly, it often helps to go the other direction: pick an angle that highlights some particularly interesting feature of the subject, and focus carefully on just that feature. Everything else will go fuzzy but will still provide context. This usually looks best if the fuzzy stuff is in the background, not foreground. The post HERE shows an example of using this approach to shoot just the head of a damselfly.

--Rik

[mgoodm3]

I am no bug guy, but the main thing that bothers me about the fly image is the dark background behinf the fly. Kinda obscures the details... maybe it's the cat?

[rjlittlefield]

The dark area underneath the fly? Yes, that definitely detracts.

I'm thinking that dark area is a shadow. Notice that there are crisp dark shadows under the legs also. But the ones under the legs are helpful because they indicate depth and separation.

Apparently the background is fairly close behind the fly, as indicated both by the shadow and the fact that we can see any detail at all in the background. That makes it real challenge to light the background so as to get good separation from the fly -- especially since you have to do it before the fly takes off!

--Rik

[Cyberspider]

But the Head of the fly is not in the same line as the back. the back is much closer to the camera...

This little Hopper is as big as the housefly and is parallel to the iamge sensor