My view of the world

These are two shots of a small Praying Mantis on an off-white stucco wall, in shadow. The insect was about 3/4 of an inch long and was the color of dry weeds.

I posted these to demonstrate depth of field and to show that you can take macro shots without spending a fortune on lenses.

They were taken in natural light with a Nikon D300 at ISO400, F13 and the lens allowed to autofocus.

You’ll notice that the bottom shot, while far from the perfect mantis pose is a much better angle, but the wrong end of the critter is in focus.
This is the reason I prefer to manually focus macro shots.

These shots have been resized and the top picture has been rotated, but are otherwise untouched.
(If you click on the picture it will take you to a larger version)

Hand held 70-300mm Nikkor -300mm ISO400 1/640 F13 sRGB 300dpi


Hand held 24-120mm Nikkor -120mm ISO400 1/640 F13 sRGB 300dpi

After looking at these shots, because the subject was relatively stationary, I should have shot raw instead of JPG, used a monopod to allow a setting of F32, ISO100, and used a matte reflector to make the light more interesting.

FWIW: This is the result of opening the bottom picture in Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 and clicking Smart Photo Fix.

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