Sometimes mistakes have interesting effects
This weekend we finally had summer! Well, at least we had one day of it. By Sunday things were chilly again and the weather forecast says it may snow later in the week. Still, it was nice getting out and photographing things and a number of insects, such as ants, became much more active. I have almost finished reading the book “Journey to the Ants”, which is fascinating and has taught me a lot about some of the behavior of ants. One thing I didn’t know was that, with a few exceptions, most ants are not active in the cold. This makes sense, but I had always figured they were up to something – just I wasn’t seeing them. Still, the carpenter ants became active in my backyard.
I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to let carpenter ant colonies thrive in our backyard, but so far they seem content to live in the rotting landscaping timbers. As I understand it takes a long time for them to do any structural damage to a house and I have not seen them near the house anyway. I decided to play my first ant “experiment” and took a carpenter ant from one part of the yard and placed it by carpenter ants in another part. I expected to see the ants not get along at all but for the most part they didn’t fight at all. The ant I moved did hide in a hole and peep out every once in awhile, but other ants from the native colony were in the same hole. Therefore my hypothesis is that the colony is larger than I thought and that all of the ants actually belong to the same colony.
While photographing the ant, I made the mistake of not correcting the aperture from some earlier shots I took of the kids. The result was I wound up with a much lower aperture than I ordinarily would have used. The effect though, is interesting and I’ll show some shots after the jump.
This shot wasn’t photoshopped at all (didn’t have the time) but I kind of like the effect of the narrow DOF – showing just the jaws and head of the ant. Here’s another shot.
The jaws open certainly appear to be a defensive posture, but as I said it was not attacked nor did it attack any of the other ants. Here are some shots I took of it after I corrected the aperture.
Normally I take my macro shots at f/11. At f/16, there is too much quality loss due to diffraction issues. At 5x sometimes I have to move the aperture down to f/9 due to diffraction issues but for most shots I find that f/11 is a decent balance between maximizing DOF and minimizing diffraction loss. In the above shot DOF is actually rather good for a macro – though I think I was only at around 2x.
Later in the day we caught some of the ants and put them in my kids’ space age ant farm. The kids are really getting a kick out of it right now and just tonight they insisted that they join us for dinner. What’s interesting as well is Nelya has taken a big interest in the ants – watching them dig tunnels and change their environment. I mentioned that ants like sugar so she placed a bit of it in their enclosure – though she gave them so much I fear they will overdose!
Still, getting back to the ‘mistake’, I think I like the narrow DOF pictures better than the shot with more DOF. What do you think?
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Tags: ant, carpenter ant, DOF, macro, photography
The first one would be better in my oppinion, if only the head with both antennas was in focus. Now you get a little distracted by the slight line of focus on the lower left side of the photo. I know that is a very difficult shot to get with an ant as it constantly moves.
I agree about f/16 on the MP-E lens. The pictures are just far too fuzzy. My default is f/13, but f/11 works well too as you’ve discovered. To go for the larger apertures usually requires consideration of the backdrop. It’s a nice effect in grass…
Oh, and, your ant is Camponotus modoc.
They’re all good shots, especially considering the difficulties of working with life subjects at extreme macro magnifications! I do prefer the shallow DOF of the first two shots, though.
I prefer the greater DOF and find the extreme blur of the first two photos distracting, BUT I will also admit to being a novice photographer who’s very much hung up on taking insect photos purely for ID purposes.
I agree that the background isn’t the best in the first shots and the DOF should be better managed. The shots were more of an accident, but I thought the results were interesting.
@myrmecos – thanks for the Id. Should I be worried that there is a large colony of these near my wooden house?