The black ones are the hardest to be near (more ferocious and willing to stick), but yesterday found this one recovering from cold and jumped in my finger, the reddish background is the reflection of flash after my finger, very friendly one.
@ exposure, this is a big overexposed image, in post processing (Canon DPP) was set at -1,17 brightness, which resulted in correct exposure to the face
f/10 | 1/125s | iso200 | FEC +2/3
Canon T1i with Canon MP-E 65mm @ 4x . 580 EX II flash bracket mounted with a LumiQuest Mini SoftBox diffuser near the lens and silver bounce at right.
I tried "expose to the right" of the histogram in order to retain more color information, I know there are compromises doing this, as the longer flash time result in more motion blur, present in the image, there are bonuses also, as the right biased histogram retain more color info for latter work, for example the reddish shadow in the eye is noiseless as no shadows adjustments were necessary. I underexposed the image in Canon DPP (as the human eye finds the best color image at slight underexposed side, something much used by slide photographers) and reduced the color temperature in the white balance setting (to 5800K) is possible to reduce more and get a more "correct" image at about 5200K but the "correct" one does not have the warm that represents the moment of photo (the wasp in my finger) the finger in this case worked as a colored card below the image.
Bottom line: lots of information is lost in post processing, by Linear Gamma concept overexposed images have more information (in term of bytes), is better to work when you have lots to discard than when you have little, in this one after the brightness adjustment there is still info enough to choose of two different "climates" for the face exposure.
The start of the session that ended in the previous photo. The wasp was motionless in a branch, as I secured the branch it jumped to my finger. This picture have different lighting aproach, the same tech specs of above minus the flash that was set at +1/3 wich resulted in a slight underxposed image, in canon DPP was neede to increase brightness in 0,17, subject more steady, smaller flash times resulted in a more sharp image but not so many color choices for post processing. It's worth note that actual RAW conversion software is able to recover some color info by recovering a underxposed image so the second one do not suffer this much in color and still have some benefits.
Noone of the two aproaches is right or wrong, is too much subject dependent, and, if working with moving subjects is moment dependent too.
