The fly is tied on a size 18, curved shanked hook. A typical mistake, as I so fortuitously provide here, is compressing too much material near the head. This results in an over developed head (fat head) at the end. ‘Less is more” (better) with many fly patterns and especially so with small flies.
Now a photography question: The back drop for this shot was bright white. The lighting was and OTT light directly over the fly less than 2″ away. On either side are two small halogen lamps also about two inches away. The Canon Xti with a 100mm Canon Macro is set on AV f22. I seem to always get a quite dark shot with the back drop actually darker than depicted here. I tweaked it with Photoscape. I am not that accomplished with the photo lingo but any advice much appreciated to achieve better lighting.
SwittersB & Exploring 
Try this:
Keeping the color balance of your lights all the same. All tungsten, or all flourescent etc. don’t mix sources and set your camera white balance accordingly. With digital (as well as film) if you start mixing light sources your color starts going haywire.
Add another light to the background or change the light ratio to give the background more light.
Also, when you camera meter sees all that white background it will try to compensate (it wants to make it an average gray, 18% I think?) by turning down the exposure. The effect is a darker exposure. Try using the manual camera settings and opening it up a couple stops from the cameras indicated exposure.
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Thanks Wayne, appreciate the points.
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Lets chat on facebook soon. I will help you get a bright white background like I have on my website.
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Thanks John. Hope you had good day in Albany.
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