female monarch

John, I am grinning from your mention of "mostly tetrapods of the mammalia class." And thanks for reviewing posting guidelines. You are correct that this is indeed an animal, nor a bird and certainly not a plant. Your choice to place it here is appropriate, as would be placing it in "macro" gallery where the overall image size should represent about 4" or less actual space. This is a well done image, IMO, with you having successfully maintained a flat perspective to the butterfly to keep those colorful wings all within the focal plane. Exposure looks very good, successfully avoiding blowing highlights or over bright sky peeking through. The only nit to my study of this image is that the brown edged leaves in the upper left tend to cause my eye to wander a bit away from this monarch, but that is beyond your control other than awaiting another picture on another perch!

What a beautiful specimen John and in absolutely great light resulting in stunning vibrant colours. Just out of curiosity re your magnification with that lens; is this a FF image?

Nice colorful dorsal view! Technically excellent as well, although if I strain my eyes a little I think I'm seeing a slight sharpening halo on the butterfly. (Aren't I a pain for being so picky! )

Nice colorful dorsal view! Technically excellent as well, although if I strain my eyes a little I think I'm seeing a slight sharpening halo on the butterfly. (Aren't I a pain for being so picky! )

Your comment is really very interesting to me, Gary. What I literally forgot to mention is that this image is really a small 2 image focus stack. And that is where the halo you are seeing is coming from. I shot this before I got Zerene, and I used CS5 Automate stacking software.

What I will now do when I get back home tomorrow or later this week is to try to find the two RAW images and process them in Zerene and then use their great retouch software on it.

When you said "strain your eyes", to me, that equates to the same thing I do when I look at these images under 100%+ magnification. That's where this sort of thing becomes evident.

So, in summary, Gary, thank you SO much for tipping me off to this! I'm going to investigate it further and I'll e-mail you when I have a result posted so you can check it out and tell me what you think.

I'm just now learning more about focus stacking, and these halos in high contrast regions are sort of a common artifact.

Oh, and finally, why I had to use a small stack is that this was my first outing with this new Pentax 300 mm f/4, and when I got home, I discovered that I didn't have sufficient DoF, which you would think should be easy with the flattness of the subject, but lightin and shutter speed / exposure were part of the equation.

Thanks, everyone, for your comments.

In going back to find the raw files for this, I guess I deleted them. But anyway, I magnified the psd version and I really don't find what I would regard as significant halo effects. I guess I won't be trying it in zerene in any case. Gotta be more careful with the raw files!