I found this praying mantis on the stairs to my apartment, and decided to keep it.
I took this photo with a slow shutter speed and on camera flash. I had the white balance set for tungsten lighting, so there was a blue cast to this photo after using flash. Honestly, I don't think the flash helped at all, although it might have made the stick more sharp.
My friend was holding the stick with the mantis on it upside down, and was moving his finger above it to get it to reach out. So the photo is a bit blurry, because the stick wasn't staying still.
I cropped off a tiny bit, sharpened the image, added some saturation and used the healing brush on parts of the black background so that the light spot from the light was a darker black.
I'm hoping this image will go over better than my "African Dance" photo from last month. People either loved it or hated it. I even got like 6 1's on it. I'm pretty sure that photo isn't complete crap. Maybe because it was ALL blurred motion? Idono. I like my African Dance photo much better than this one, but I know I will get a higher score on this one.
What can you do.
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Nice capture of the mantis, but I think I would like it better without the motion blur. Though that does certainly add a level of humor to the shot :-)
A clever idea; the blurred legs are very effective, but it is a shame that there is some movement in the rest of the body resulting in a rather soft image. Definitely worth trying more of these, 'though.
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