Pierre Williot
May 2025 - Spotted Lady Beetle walking on a Common Dandelion
About the Image(s)
Here I captured this image of a Spotted Lady Beetle walking on a Common Dandelion. I used my hand-held OM-1 Mark II camera with an OM 90 mm Macro lens (1/250 sec, f/ 8, ISO 800). Initially I tried this capture as a stack of 10 images, using the in-camera focus stacking capability. Unfortunately, this Lady Beetle was moving and I ended up with a bug with too many legs to count! The OM camera system (as well as Olympus in the past) will capture and save all the images as JPG and RAW files and will focus stack a final image as a JPG file. So, I simply reviewed the files, selected the image with the best overall focus and used that single image. Finally I used ON1-Photo raw for editing adjustments (light adjustments, cropping, de-noise and slight soft vignette).
2 comments posted
The bottom out of focus grasses are somewhat of a distraction in your image, may I offer some suggestions.
I would diffuse the bottom grasses and leave the flower and beetle very sharp. Using your select tool select the bottom grasses to be worked on, then in filters use your blur tool and select Gaussian Blur and blur the bottom grasses. This tool is adjustable so use the slider to attain just the right amount of blur to achieve the look you want in the bottom grasses. It takes some practice to use this blur tool successfully.
Posted: 05/10/2025 15:17:07
I will give it a trial. Posted: 05/10/2025 16:58:28