Thistle Wasp
This was an interesting little wasp collecting from the thistles at Island View Beach yesterday. It has an awfully pointy abdomen.
I tried tone-mapping these images, as well as regular processing. Overall, for this wasp, I prefer the regular processing. In the next day or two, I will show a fly for which the tone-mapping works better.
Check out the gallery below to compare the two kinds of processing.
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To open the gallery view below click on any thumbnail, use the arrows to navigate and escape to return to this page.
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- tonemapped
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- regular processing
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- tonemapped
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- regular processing
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Canon 5Dii, Canon 100mm/f2.8 macro, ISO100, f3.2, 1/200th
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burnt embers 
The images are beautiful. I agree, the regular processing is better. I think Ken is right in his assessment.
The wasp contemplates
Flowers while we have thoughts on
Post photography.
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Hi Ryan, when this comment came through I was reworking some of my bee/fly photos for an upcoming post. Taking some of the noise out of the tonemapped ones. I think I can improve them quite a bit without losing too much of what makes the bee nice.
And, once again, thanks for the poem. I have no idea how you just whip these things off. Maybe you just think this way. Probably even speak in Haiku if someone is listening for it.
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Ha! One or two of my collection have been haiku I’ve caught as they jumped from my mouth. But I probably do. I often scan the lines in my head before even consciously counting. But that’s just practice.
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Definitely a common problem in working with HDR. Some say it’s due to a lack of brackets that are exposed properly for the area in question, but to be honest I am not 100% sure about that myself as I have seen these artifacts in many cases when having the proper number of source brackets to work with. In some cases a bit of noise can actually add a little something to a scene, but I can see why you both feel in this case it doesn’t. Regardless, I find it amazing how the two processes you use here can produce such differing results, in terms of feel you get when viewing the image. I like ’em both honestly, I can see things in both methods presented that are very appealing.
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Hi Toad – it could be a lack of the right bracket – I only used three at about +/-1 EV and this was a pretty tricky spot to metre – I was going back and forth between a matrix and spot metered exposure on this outing. These are matrix metering, others that I will be showing soon were spot metered, as are the thistle down pictures in my next post. Overall, I like either of these and if only one were available to me, I would be happy. The one ‘loss’ I don’t much approve of is less definition in the eye in the bottom tonemapped image in the gallery as it is a very interesting eye to me.
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While the bee looks better in the tone mapped photo, the rest of the photo has a bit too much noise that gets accentuated as well. The “regular” processing works for me very nicely. I’ve come across this conundrum before and what i end up doing is masking out the offensive part from the tone mapping and replacing it with the “regular”. A little extra work but satisfying.
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Thanks Ken – that was what I did not like as well. I am not ready for that kind of photo manipulation (lacking the software among other problems) but I am getting there. In this instance I think it would be too much work for too little return as the LR processed image is just fine. Now, what would be nice if someone would develop software that allowed masking and then tone mapping the mask only. Having said this, I think it unlikely that this has not already been done.
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