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John Cooper
01-23-2008, 01:53 AM
Photographed in the Kakadu national park, Northern Territory. These green tree ants make nests by sewing leaves together. Anyone who has brushed against these aggressive little critters will remember their nip, and just to make sure you know they are angry they squirt some formic acid in for good measure!!

Canon EOS 10D, Canon 100mm macro, natural light with fill flash, 1/125 sec F16, Hand held.

Kaushik Balakumar
01-23-2008, 06:08 PM
Lovely. They are all standing in an orderly manner here. Looks like they were anticipating something from you ...

rgds,
Kaushik

Stephen Stephen
01-23-2008, 07:53 PM
John this is a nice image but I might do a vertical flip with the whole image. I realise that they are hanging on but it seems to me that they're ready to fall out of the frame.

Mike Moats
01-24-2008, 07:49 AM
Hey John very cool image of some cool critters. I wonder if you could have shot this without the flash, as it has caused some hot spots in the bodies and added the shadows which I find adds more lines and shapes in a image that already has alot going on in details. I would think these guys were most likely moving around, and the flash was needed to speed up the shot to stop the action. You didn't mention the ISO, so you might have shot at a higher ISO for the extra speed and used the natural light without the flash.

David Steele
01-24-2008, 12:37 PM
A great image John. And I think the shadows enhance the story. . . .

Joseph Warfel
02-18-2008, 09:31 PM
Hello John,

Seeing your tree ant photo, I wonder if you had seen the ant-mimicing spider also. The spider belongs to the crab spider family but doesn't look much like one. Hope everyone likes my first post with an image.
Spider is: Amyciaea albomaculata

Canon 1D MkII, MP-E 65mm macro, MT-24 Twin Flash
Queensland, Aus

Regards,
Joe Warfel