This guy was fast! Photo taken through two 50mm lenses back to back. My "coupling ring" does not couple - so hand held the two lenses together while releasing the ant, and trying to capture him in the 1 or 2mm depth of field that resulted from the lens thing (he was about 3-4mm long, and you can see that the DoF does not cover his antenna to body, or body to back leg). He liked running uphill, but not up sugar cubes (lots of picking uyp and depositing). Think I caught this one while he was thinking - shortly afterwards, perhaps as a result of the flashgun firing, he went crazy and ran like bilio.
Best detail is in the foreleg on the left had side: amazing to see his little claws gripping the sugar granule! And the inside of his mouth, where there is something white and striated. Wish I could reshoot using RAW and more carefully selected shutter speed (I underexposed by two full stops, but should have manually selected an even faster exposure to get more detail in the sugar).
Wish I could spot edit out the hair (ingrained in the sugar cube - eeugh!) and spot edit the contrast and detail on the ant. I was using 1600 ISO (very little light through two lenses even with 1000w lamp lighting the scene) and image was very grainy. There is a fraction more detail in the image, but I had to draw a line between Neat Image grainless image and Very grainy image (which would not do well even in a granular contest). Applied NeatImage weakly in the end and boosted the magenta spectrum to increase contrast a little without colour casting the scene.
This is about a crop, reduced by 50% for submission (ie the original crop was twice this size).
Thanks to Adrian for his rescue and returning of ant to sugar in my attempted reshoot of this, even though we never manages to get him fully in frame and in focus again (at least not on the sugar). Will post a non-sugar (non-granular) image of the underside of this ant in amazing detail after challenge.
No ant was harmed in the taking of this photo!
File Name
IMG_6205.JPG
Camera Model
Canon EOS 20D
Shooting Date/Time
23/05/2005 20:58:05
Shooting Mode
Aperture-Priority AE
Tv( Shutter Speed )
1/250
Av( Aperture Value )
10.0
Metering Mode
Center-Weighted Average Metering
Exposure Compensation
-1 1/3
ISO Speed
1600
Lens
50.0 mm
Focal Length
50.0 mm
Image Size
3504x2336
Image Quality
Fine
Flash
On
Flash Type
External E-TTL
Flash Exposure Compensation
0
Red-eye Reduction
On
Shutter curtain sync
1st-curtain sync
White Balance Mode
Auto
AF Mode
Manual Focus
Parameters Settings
Contrast Standard
Sharpness Standard
Color saturation Standard
Color tone 0
Color Space
sRGB
Noise Reduction
Off
File Size
2578 KB
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