Hi Alane: Thank you for the interesting information regarding this very large moth.

Certainly a treat to be able to photograph this large and colorful moth. A special find such as this deserves to be razor sharp in detail, sad to say on my monitor the moth is simply soft in detail and not at all as tack sharp as it should be.

In looking back at your pictures from prior months I do not see any mention of you ever using a tripod which is part of my gear and used a lot. Aside for being able to obtain sharper images using a tripod helps the photographer to compose your images correctly. Case in point here is the right wing tip of the moth is almost touching the edge of the picture area. We cannot possible see all 4 corners of the frame at the same time; by using a tripod slows one down and allows the photographer to study their composition arrangement to make certain you have composed your chosen image to be the best it can be.   Posted: 07/09/2025 05:08:58

Alane...The capture of this moth is an exceptional find and not one you would see anytime anywhere. I would like to make several suggestions. It's a soft picture with beautiful colors and background. I noticed your settings are very low and I would suggest bumping the f-stop to at least 14 with an ISO of 800 or higher. Higher settings can help in the absence of a tripod and will give you a sharper image. You had good light so shooting in Manual Mode would be another suggestion.   Posted: 07/10/2025 06:40:30

This image is an interesting presentation of an impressive subject. The colorful moth is nicely presented although I don't disagree with the earlier comments about it being a bit soft. A bit of post=process sharpening might help this a bit. The woodwork the moth is on is a bit bright and to my eye, is pulling our attention away from the subject. While this may be unavoidable in collecting this shot, we don't need to live with it in the final image. Here I would select and darken the background to emphasize the subject even more.

Murphy also raises a valid point in terms of your composition, being too close to the right-hand edge. While the best time to counter this is while you were behind the viewfinder, we can also use the newer ability of Photoshop and Lightroom to expand the canvas a bit more (as long as one does not object to the addition of a bit of AI generated pixels to the image). . I have included a version of this image with these suggestions to illustrate my thoughts. See what you think …
  Posted: 07/10/2025 19:31:48

Very interesting information about this unusual moth.
Nice capture - colors and directing lines. I agree with the crop modification on the right as the tip of the wing was almost touching the edge. If one wants to frame this image, there would be good chances that the frame would partly remove part of the wing....
I agree that generative AI can frequently be used to successfully enlarge a crop that was too tight in-camera.
Nice.   Posted: 07/14/2025 18:45:44

Hi Alane, an interesting image, very colorful! I think it would be better to make it contraster and sharper. Thanks for sharing!   Posted: 07/23/2025 13:09:18