Ever look at an ant really, really close?

[◄ Jess ►]

How do you get such great depth of field? Do you stack images?? None of my insect photography looks that great because so little of it is in focus. That's amazing.

(if you're not stacking images, do you know what f-stop you used for that? Or did you crop the image down some? I'm so jealous)

This is the closest I can find to an ant that I've taken a photo of...there is only like 1mm that are really in focus. I think you have much more on your ant. And I took this at f/20.

[The Hooded Claw]

(anyone not a macro photography geek should skip this post or put a pillow on the keyboard for when your nose crashes into it)

Actually, the sharp depth of field here is quite small, probably about as thick as a credit card.  Keep in mind this is an ant, and the beetle you showed is titanic compared to him!  If you look at the ant's legs and body in the 100% view, you'll see that the closest part of her body is in focus, but the center of her body (highest part we can see in the photo) is out of focus.  And most of her front leg is out of focus.  Go outside and find a red ant and look at her, and think about how narrow that portion of the body is!

The good thing about that photo is that I did put all of my limited depth of field right along the side of her body where it needed to be (strutting a bit).  think of laying a playing card flat against the side of her body.  I was able to do that through SKILL....

SKILL for this purpose, is defined as "taking a whole bunch of shots and throwing most of them away!"     I don't remember the exact numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if when I took this shot, I took about 200 shots over a two hour period of crawling over an anthill (ladies, note that dates with me are thrilling!).  I'd guess that of the 200 shots, I deleted about 180 or so of them just from the thumbnail, without even opening the full file (because they were hopelessly out of focus or because the subject wasn't in the frame by the time I flicked the shutter).  A wild guess would be that on viewing the files I threw out all but a handful of the remaining photos, keeping maybe three to five photos out of the two hundred.  There isn't another way to do it with living wild ants....Your depth of field, as you've pointed out, is a millimeter or two, and the ants are moving at five or ten millimeters per second (that's a wild guess, but you get the idea) and I don't have any trained ants that move exactly parallel to my camera.

I used to spout off at a macro photography board about how at 5x it is like sliding a credit card through your subject to get the thickness of the sharp depth of field, till a very smart photographer there who has the annoying habit of almost always being right about technical matters pointed out to me that a credit card is considerably thicker than the actual sharp DOF you have at 5x!

I have done stacking, but it won't work with moving subjects like these.  It's great with lazy, static, snakes in zoos, though.

This was taken with all-flash lighting, f/11, 1/250th of a second.  My guesstimate of the magnification is that it's about 2.5x.  When your magnification goes up, the f/stop number also increases, I'd guess the "effective" f/stop here was about f/35 or f/40.

Incidentally, the top photo is the entire shot, no cropping.  The lower photo is a 100% crop of the top shot.

Jessica?  Wake up, Jessica!   

[JennaAnderson]

Eeeeewwwww - cool!

[telracs]

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oh, sorry, forehead/keyboard....

[◄ Jess ►]

Thank you SO much for that explanation. I'm still a beginner and couldn't believe how small the DOF was when I started taking bug pictures. I think I'm going to go find an ant this weekend and try photographing it.

[The Hooded Claw]

I stumbled across this photo this evening (how exactly do you stumble over a digital photo?) and remembered this thread.  These are the same type of Pogo ants in the exact same anthill.  On the left, one ant is zealously guarding the entrance to the ant nest, ready to chomp with her jaws on the huge camera lenses that is looming overhead, while in the center, her sister continues with the routine maintenance of carrying a lump of dirt out of the nest.  Maintenance work must go on, even in the face of giant intruders!

Note that this photo is taken shooting straight down, with the front of my lens pointed down into the tunnel, about two inches away from the entrance.  The ants are actually slightly inside the tunnel, and only visible because my flash shined down into the anthill.

[sherylb]

Whoa! Amazing. More, please.

[Susan Alison]

These are amazing pics. And I love your explanations, too. Thank you!

[R. M. Reed]

I think ants are neat, even though I had a long battle with tiny ones that kept coming into my kitchen. You say the workers often bring non-seed items to the nest, but who sorts them out? One type in the nest must be smarter than the workers.

[The Hooded Claw]

I think ants are neat, even though I had a long battle with tiny ones that kept coming into my kitchen. You say the workers often bring non-seed items to the nest, but who sorts them out? One type in the nest must be smarter than the workers.

The books I've read don't describe a separate caste of ants that do the sorting(some species of ants have workers specialized for different tasks beyond the male drones and the breeding females, the most common one being an adaptation for fighting), and since the adaptations are usually physical, that's not surprising.  I know the more humdrum worker ants of many species usually do different tasks at different times of their lives.  For the species I've read about, newly-hatched workers tend the eggs and pupae, then they move to doing tunnel maintenance, and ants actually send the elderly out to do the hunting and gathering.  This makes a lot of sense, an infection of fungus or other nasty-nasty on the eggs would be a disaster, and newly-hatched workers haven't had the chance to go out and pick up a "bug".  Besides, when hatched they are right there and ready to go to work!  Also, being a forager is a very dangerous job, so it makes a certain amount of sense to send out those who have already lived a significant fraction of their lives (because the ants want to get maximum use out of each worker, not out of some "humanitarian" motive).

When Pogo ants feel threatened, they get nasty, no half-measures,  by preference, they will grab on with their jaws and bite, and at the same time sting an opponent.  Once while photographing ants, I carelessly laid the strap of my camera bag across the area around the nest that the ants considered "theirs".  This worker ant knows that that strap is up to no good, so she is going all out to defend it, biting and stinging.  She is facing away from us, but you can sort of tell that her head is bowed down and biting for all she is worth!

[R. Doug]

LOVE this last shot.

[R. M. Reed]

Defending the homeland from invading straps!

[jumbojohnny]

I've just flicked right through the whole thread, really brilliant piccys, superb. I do take the odd piccy of nature myself but none are anywhere near like this. Not sure if my camera is up to it, it probably isn't, but I'll have a go on the next clear day. I doubt if I can find an ant but I am sure some creepy crawlies will be around, and (pardon the pun) I'll give it my best shot.

[The Hooded Claw]

Nope, it is not a color still from the movie "THEM!" (one of my favorites!), this is a shot of a regular-sized harvester ant coming up out of the anthill.  I had the camera lens pointed down at about a sixty degree angle almost in line with the tunnel so that it looks like we are right on the ants level!  This was one of my earliest successful ant shots, but I still think it is a good one!

This is at close to 5x, note how little sharp depth of field there is, the ant's head is on focus, but the closer antenna is too close and is fuzzy, and the thorax (middle section of the ant's body) is getting out of focus because it is too far away!  I have a copy of this printed out on an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper that is very very cool!

[sherylb]

Wow! It almost looks like it should be speaking.

[R. M. Reed]

Snapping the picture in the very short moment when the ant's head is in focus is quite a skill. Though I suspect this was the one great one out of many, good photography can be a numbers game.

[dori chatelain]

Awesome photos I believe your camera helps you make great pictures.

[The Hooded Claw]

The above little guy is actually an interloper who doesn't belong in this thread....He is commonly called an ant, but he's actually a wasp!  I photographed her in Joshua Tree National Park a few years ago while photographing lizards, and equipped appropriately, with a lens that was totally unsuitable for closeup photography.  I saw this little guy trundling about in the desert.  With his white fuzz and quick, but trundling gait, he had a kind of a cute and fuzzy "Care Bear" appearance, and I had no clue what he was.  I desperately wanted to get a photo, so did my best with what I had, and this was the result.  He's much bigger than the harvester ants I've been posting here, he was close to an inch long.  He was heading into the cover of brush, and I had a strong impulse to reach down and swoop him back into the open.  But "a little voice" in my head insisted that I must not do that, even though the little thing was clearly harmless.  I had perhaps a minute to photograph him, and had to wait between each shot for my flash to recycle, so only got a few attempts, and the old bugaboo of "shallow depth of field" was on the prowl.  I got one halfway-decent shot before he disappeared into the brush and I didn't see him again.  After hoping he'd come out, I went back to photographing lizards.

That evening in the hotel room, I realized that his form was familiar, even though his shape wasn't.  Digging around a little more revealed a nasty surprise.  He is a special desert adaptation of the Velvet Ant (actually a wingless wasp), better known to most of us as a "cow killer".  They have a painful sting (so I hear, I've never been stung by one) and I would not have liked it if I'd touched him with my fingers.  Because of his white color, I hadn't even considered this being a velvet ant, but once the memory was triggered, even the way he moved is consistent with the bright red velvet ants I've seen in Oklahoma.  The common name for these critters is "Thistledown Velvet Ant", but again they are actually wasps, not ants.

The reason for the white color is camouflage.  The white fuzz can be confused with the seed of a creosote bush that is common in the desert, and that is the plan.  Apparently things are so tough in the desert that even the warning bright red "Don't touch me, I sting" coloration of the regular velvet ant is considered an invitation, not a warning.  Here's a link to a picture of a creosote bush (not my pic) including the fuzzy white seeds this guy is mimicking.

http://www.callutheran.edu/Academic_Programs/Departments/Biology/Wildflowers/des/flowers/fwr-14.htm
 

[Caroline Ann Martin]

Great shot!!!

[The Hooded Claw]

Enough with the harvester ants, here is a much smaller ant who is carrying a very big load.  I love her golden color, but I have no idea what species she is.



This is shot at about 4x, but about 25% of the shot on the left was cropped (she was a fast little thing and almost zipped out of the picture!).