Central American Montane Tiger Beetle (Pseudoxycheila tarsalis)

Fantastic capture of this very colorful beetle!! Beautiful irredesence!

this little guy was so colorful that I had to get a picture. But he (or she, no idea) was fast and would not sit still for a moment. I was following it around snapping shots in "machine gun" mode hoping to get something usable for about 15 minutes till I finally felt kind of strange with people walking by staring at the weirdo with the camera chasing a little beetle around. But it really highlighted the need to get better acquainted with the manual settings on my flash.

Normally I just use the TTL metering and make corrections to the strength of the flash via the cameras flash compensation. This was not working while I was trying to freeze the motion of the moving beetle so I was forced to crank up the ISO and open the aperture so that I could get the exposure time down to 1/500th using existing light. The resulting shallow depth of field meant that of the ridiculous number of images I took of this beetle, only a handful were in focus, and only this one had any aesthetic merit. So while I wish it had turned out a little better, I'm happy to have gotten it at all.