No flash fired.. black photo recovered (bee macro)

[Usuqa]

Well today i went walking around with a macro setup (50-200mm lens with 2x tele converter and raynox dmc 250) just to see if there was anything interesting to take a photo off.

I heard this buzzing noise and noticed a bee flying from flower to flower, so i did as you do and get ready for a shot. I managed to get the bee hovering just next to a flower with its tongue out and had my new sigma flash set to fire wireless but it didn't fire and i ended up with this is my shot


I wasnt to happy, as the bee flew away and i thought i had missed my chance at a nice shot .

But not one for quiting i went to my pc later and boosted the EV by about 4, messed around with some other settings and i managed to recover a photo from it after all. Sure its lost alot of detail, had vertical banding noise and the colors are a little off but from a totally black photo to what i managed to get i was quite happy to at least see the photo i tryed to capture. I just wish the flash had fired so i could have seen the real thing.



I guess this is another one of these reason's on why you should shoot raw

[Canadian Mum]

Wow... quite the recovery!! Good Job!

[dmvp]

Are you serious?!? That's quite something! I'm amazed.

[Usuqa]

the gx10 (k10d really) is known to keep alot of detail in the shadows at iso 100. So i guess thats maby one of the reasons i was able to get so much back from such a dark shot? (i haven't used other dlsr's so im not sure if its the same on all).

Anyway i have the raw, its around 16meg i could try host it for others to try if they wanted

[GEli]

Wow, that's something. How much noise reduction have you done already? It looks pretty good, but if you haven't done any yet a quick run through NoiseNinja (or an equivalent plugin/program) could deal with the lateral chroma noise quite nicely.

[bindibadgi]

Wow. Most people would have just turfed the black photo.

[RussHeath]

Nice save! Now you just need to figure out how to let the ISO automatically rise so this doesn't happen to you again . . .

[Usuqa]

hehe well i know how to do that , the thing was.. the flash didnt catch the signal from the on built flash to fire, so i ended up with a black photo so i dont think auto iso would have helped at all there anyway.

I did do a quick run though noise ninja and it did help quite a bit.

[Usuqa]

here's the raw file incase anyone wants to mess around

[Agata]

That's really impressive. :-)