Double Trouble

Hi Lori,

I like the composition and the colors in the scene.  You may want to tame the very bright highlights especially in those yellow petals and work those dark shadow areas to pull up some more detail. Foraging honey bees rarely sting and you may have used a shampoo or skin care product that have some ingredients that are found in honey bee alarm pheromone.  I find that one shampoo that I used previously causes my bees to go into attack mode.  I switched shampoos and problem disappeared...................Jim

Good job on getting both bees nice and sharp, Lori. Not always easy to do. The bright light obviously helped gets everything in focus without subject movement, but the tradeoff is that you have a lot of contrast due to the bright light. As suggested by Jim, maybe you could try some selective burning, dodging, and cloning to control the highlights and bring up some of the dark areas.      

I've had to recover from a hard drive crash a couple of times in my career and it is a beast, with only a small fraction of the information being recoverable (at least by me using conventional recovery tools, maybe a professional recovery site can do better).  This is a good looking view of these two bees on a nicely colorful flower.  Just to show how different each viewer is, I think the darks look fine.  Yes, some toning down of the yellow hot spots could be good, but they are small enough to be a minor distraction.  The regional California Nature Photographer's (CANP) site has a 15% cloning technique that works well for blown highlights like these.

Hello Lori, Great sharpness in both bees and the whole image. The photo is sunny and happy for me. The light here looks a little harsh.

Great detail in the bees Lori. Bright and lively indeed.

Hi, Thank you all for your kind comments. As for the harsh lighting, yes, I agree. This was shot shortly after noon on a late Spring day. Though we had time to stroll, the other folks in the group were moving rather fast and I didn't have time to do anything but shoot on auto.  I'm rather a purist with my nature images, and choose to limit my pp editing. Don't use PS or LR, just basic, crop, minor light adjustments, sharp, contrast, etc. But, I have new gear with more controls and bells and whistles that I haven't figured out yet!!  I will be able to correct for these types of problems soon!
Lori ;.)