Jagged Ambush Bug.

[Daniel Cadieux]

This amazing dinosaur look-alike was found mere feet from the Assassin Bug I posted just prior to this one. There were about twenty of these guys on this Brown-eyed Susan patch, some were yellow, some whitish, and some green like this one. They wait patiently until another insect walks by and then just grab them quickly with their strong forelegs and consume their prey on the spot...sometimes prey that is many times larger than themselves!

Canon 7D + 100mm f/2.8 macro + 20mm extention tube, manual exposure, evaluative metering, 1/250s., f/8, ISO 800, natural light, handheld, FF.

[Jonathan Ashton]

The head and thorax are beautifully sharp, the adbomen begins to fade off focus a little bit. Dan you seem to be very keen on the extension tube but I would suggest that without it you would have had perfect DOF at f8, a small crop may have been necessary but I think the image quality would have still been very high WDYT?

[Daniel Cadieux]

It must be the bird photographer in me...with birds I am OK as long as the eye and face are sharp and it doesn't matter where DOF falls off after that - and I treat the insects like smaller versions of birds...I realize that for insects the consensus looks to be to have the subject sharp from head to toe. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Dave Leroy]

A tough but happy looking character. Nicely framed and certainly is sharp where it counts, although I agree that the bit oof does distract a bit. It makes me wonder about advantages of setting camera for a bit of rear focus.
Thanks for tip about habitat. I will keep my eyes posted on Black-eyed Susan patch.

[Jason Stander]

Beautiful critter... detail and exposure is beautiful... love the angle... agree though on the dof... otherwise VWD Daniel!

[nzmacro]

Something we don't have here, so I always enjoy seeing them. Sharp and love the colours in this. Nicely done for my tastes.

Danny.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Daniel. Ambush Bugs are very cool! This one is posing nicely for you in good light. Also excellent sharpness within your DOF and good comp. I would agree with the others about the DOF - the image would be much stronger, IMO, if the front legs were sharp since they are a pretty important part of being an ambush bug. :S3: Given that this is FF, you could have backed off an inch or two to increase DOF and with a 7D you could crop back to this comp in post and still would have plenty of pixels to work with. (Essentially the same thing Jonathan said above. :S3:) Next time out you might experiment with some different shooting distances to get a better feel for how this works at the macro level. I think if you tweak your DOF your images will be over the top!

[Anita Bower]

Ugly little critter. :t3 Strong composition, colors, light. I see what others say about the front legs.