Taken outside on a whim. I used my Canon 50mm f/2.5 macro lens. First attempt at using aperture priority. By the way, it's VERY tough to focus on a moving ant especially with a macro lens.
Extracted the JPG from the RAW file then I did a rotate, crop, resize, levels and curves. No sharpening was needed.
Statistics
Place: 78 out of 248 Avg (all users): 5.6209 Avg (commenters): 7.1111 Avg (participants): 5.6667 Avg (non-participants): 5.5323 Views since voting: 1223 Views during voting: 259 Votes: 182 Comments: 11 Favorites: 1 (view)
Ooops, I forgot to correct some of my comments to reflect the photo entry change. My first entry was of an ant on a palm frond but it had multiple focus points so I entered this instead. But I still used my macro lens and no sharpening and no color balance.
Thanks everyone for your comments and they are very much appreciated! Glad I finally got a decent score! :) Now to address some of the comments...
Skiprow, I agree that the shot could have used more DOF. It is very shallow and I realized that during post processing. Very little I could do as it was night time. I thought I had all four points in focus but even using the camera's LCD and zoomed in it was difficult to really tell.
Digital Quixote, I really wanted to PM you during the voting but I had to restrain myself! :) It was just by chance that I placed the center of the X on an intersection of one of the thirds. If you take another look and imagine the thirds both horizontal and vertical you can see that the X does land on one of the intersections. I was looking at Jodie Coston's tutorials after the voting started and she mentioned this but I did mine more or less by mistake. So, technically, it's not centered like you said.
Overall, I wanted to use the shallow DOF to my advantage by placing focus on the four points of the X but it didn't work out as I had planned namely because all four are not focused. I also hoped that since I didn't enter a bug or flower that would give me extra points. Maybe next time...
I'm not sure what it is about this shot that I like so much but I keep coming back to it. The composition is striking and tends to draw me in. The tones and textures are also nice.
Dramatic colors and lighting. For my taste, the DOF may be a bit shallow. And I am not normally a fan of a centered composition, but maybe in this case it would have worked. But then you would have received a bunch of "rule of thirds" comments. Can't win I guess.
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