Ants on a Peony

Justin Gallagher

May 9^th, 2006

I decided to give some macro photography a try this weekend. I’ll tell you what, it’s tough. This was handheld, and isn’t as sharp as I was hoping. I also feel like I should have used a polarizer. Anyone out there have any tips for taking macro shots?

And while we’re talking tips, I’ve noticed recently that my images look very different when I look at them at home on my mac using Safari compared to when I look at them at work using IE or Firefox. I’m assuming this has something to do with the ability of Safari to read the color profile embedded in the jpegs. Does anyone have a good way of dealing with this? It’s quite dissapointing to spend time getting contrast and saturation just how I want them, only to have the majority of viewers see a completely different looking image.

Great macro!

Roger — May 9^th, 2006

Nice looking macro with wonderful colors, and I think that you did just fine with the lighting.
It could benefit maybe from a touch of selective sharpening with Photoshop in and around the bud & ant, but still, it looks fine to me as is.
Nice shot!
As far as the difference in tonal range of your images when looked at on different screens/monitors, I would think that most likely it could be the calibration of the monitors.
Yours at home might be calibrated to get the accurate colors, where at work, there is no telling if they ever have been calibrated at all.
On my Mac here at home, the images all look the same no matter which browser I use.
Now if I look at them on my kids computer, or computers at work, they look quite a bit darker, … even richer in color.
Hope this helps!

Michael Brown — May 9^th, 2006