Activity for User 502 - Murphy Hektner - mhektner@frontier.com

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838 Comments / 243 Replies Posted

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Group Round C/R Comment Date Image
63 Aug 19 Comment Hi Dan: I could have moved back to have included more of the vine the little bell shaped flowers were hanging from. In doing so the flowers would have become so small in size in the picture they would have become very insignificant.
Regarding being new to making comments: not to worry Dan, we were all beginners at one time.		 Aug 29th
63 Aug 19 Comment Hi Priscilla: I use the basic brush tool to mainly tone down distractions in the background, it does take a lot of practice. I believe you use Elements as I do, so will explain briefly. The tool brush is a small icon in your list of tools; click on that tool and you may have Smart Brush and Detail Smart Brush come up, so hi-light those. Then push the B key and your Basic Tool Brush should appear, this is the tool you want to use. It works much like the cloning tool in a lot of ways; I use the soft mechanical 300 size brush at low opacity set at 15%. Do not attempt to use the hard mechanic brush as it will not work. You can find used Elements how to books on line, they go into great detail, much more than I can explain here. Hope this helps!! Aug 13th
63 Aug 19 Comment Hi Priscilla: I like to photograph pansy faces, they are always interesting. The entire flower seems soft in focus, even the central part seems a bit off. With this type of a close in portrait in my opinion you need really good sharpness. I would think f/11 or even f/16 would bring the entire flower into really good sharp focus. At this magnification your focus has to be perfect, did you use a tripod ?? Aug 13th
63 Aug 19 Comment Hi Pat: Pleasing color palette with the medium pink and yellow with the green background, also good central sharpness. In my humble opinion I think you have cropped in far too close, the flower needs more breathing room around it, feels really tight in the frame to me especially the top and bottom. Aug 13th
63 Aug 19 Comment Hi Dan: Interesting subjects to work on. Both Sharon and Neal's comments are good. Using F/9 will not give you enough depth of field to entirely cover the subjects with enough sharpness, would suggest using f/16 on your next attempt and you will have improved sharpness on your subject.
Background while out of focus is still slightly too busy, in your post processing you can easily diffuse the background to make it smoother. Use your basic paintbrush at low opacity, perhaps 20% for starters.		 Aug 13th
63 Aug 19 Comment Hi Neal: You have mastered the use of focus stacking for certain. The Grasshopper is shown with extreme sharpness; at this high magnification focus stacking is the only way to achieve this. You can try to stop your macro lens down to f/22 and even then you could not render the subject in total sharpness front to back. At f/22 you run into diffraction problems where the entire image softens up, so what is in focus would not show anything close to the sharp detail you have shown here.
Choice of background color is well chosen and I like the border treatment very well. Good Work!!		 Aug 13th
63 Aug 19 Comment Hi Priscilla and Neal: Thanks for your positive comments on the 3 Bells. Guess I am not especially into vignette, so do not use it, however I have viewed certain types of images where it enhanced the overall presentation. We all have our preferences as to what appeals to us Aug 13th
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