Praying Mantis (at f4)

Praying Mantis, Sept 29, 2005
My lens was wide open for this shot of the praying mantis walking through my back yard. It was evening, and getting dark, and the mantis kept moving at a pretty steady pace. I could predict most movements, but still had to work hard to get the face in focus. Due to the movement, I wanted to make sure the motion was frozen for the frame, so I picked a shutter speed of 1/100 and therefore needed to open up my lens to f4. I love the way this mantis looks THROUGH THE CAMERA, so it seems, and INTO MY EYES. The wide open aperture limits my depth of field (the depth into the image that can be in focus at any one time) but I think it's kind of neat the way the mantis face seems to emerge from its blurry body. This adds an interesting three dimensional quality to the image.
And yes, I was using my tripod, without flash. (Flash would have created a lot of sharp shadows, and would have caused the mantis to be much brighter than the background, to the point of making the scene look rather fake.) After loading the image onto my computer, I increased the exposure somewhat using Nikon Image Capture editing because the face of the mantis was just too dark to see clearly. Aside from that, this is pretty much the way the mantis looked on Thursday evening last week.
I know this has nothing to do with woodland spring. But that's ok. Truth is, I love all kinds of nature photography all times of year. I will keep posting miscellaneous current stuff as well as some other spring photos from earlier this year. (I thought about breaking this into two websites: WOODLAND SPRING and OTHER NATURE PHOTOGRAPHY, but for now, I prefer to stick with just one.)