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D. Robert Franz
01-12-2011, 11:16 AM
A very small red ant photographed at around 2.5X lifesize during the 2010 ICF Pro Tour in TX

Camera Model: Canon EOS 7D
Shutter speed: 1/250 sec
Aperture: 22
Exposure mode: Manual
Flash: On
Metering mode: Multi-segment
ISO: 200
Focal length: 360mm

Roman Kurywczak
01-12-2011, 12:31 PM
Very nice Dale! I might just tone down the flash highlights?.....on the abdomen and a few small other areas.....but minor and very nicely done overall!

D. Robert Franz
01-12-2011, 12:36 PM
Very nice Dale! I might just tone down the flash highlights?.....on the abdomen and a few small other areas.....but minor and very nicely done overall!

Agreed Roman. Of course I couldn't do that for ICF contests but for this I surely could. I was boucing one flash off a white board and the other was diffused in an effort to reduce the reflections. It did help quite a bit. Really hard to eliminate all the reflective highlights.. May have to try cross polarization....

Julie Kenward
01-12-2011, 01:11 PM
Lovely image, Robert. I especially like how the filaments on the plant repeat the pattern of the tiny hairs on the ant.

Steve Maxson
01-12-2011, 03:21 PM
Hi Dale. Well done on the comp, sharpness, and background. I, too, noticed the flash-generated specular highlights (often a problem with these shiny-bodied insects). If you wanted to spend the time, some careful cloning could clean up most of those. :)

Ken Childs
01-13-2011, 09:14 AM
Hey Dale, the flash highlights have already been covered.....the only other thing I might do to improve this already awesome image would be to give a shot at sharpening that back antenna. Overall this shot rocks!

Jonathan Ashton
01-14-2011, 12:07 PM
Great shot, what lens did you use? Was it 180mm & 2x TC? DOF at high mag. obviously presents it problems but you really do have a fine image there.
Whenever I see one like this I tend to ask myself would it have been better taken at a lower magnification and then cropped a little so that the DOF would have been greater - do you have any thoughts on this approach?

D. Robert Franz
01-14-2011, 12:40 PM
Great shot, what lens did you use? Was it 180mm & 2x TC? DOF at high mag. obviously presents it problems but you really do have a fine image there.
Whenever I see one like this I tend to ask myself would it have been better taken at a lower magnification and then cropped a little so that the DOF would have been greater - do you have any thoughts on this approach?

It was the 180mm + 2x and if I remember correctly the 500D close up diopter.

I guess it would depend on your end usage. However for the ICF Pro-Tour no cropping is allowed so I had no other option. For my stock photo sales I never crop an image, that's up to the end user. For other uses composing looser and cropping may be an good option.