nutek

Grain in photo deliberately not cleaned up - I wanted to show a harsh,

bitter environment that the squirrel was in, and a smooth, noiseless

background would not have that effect. Does this work for you?

WOW!!! 7/7

this is so surreal.

Any comments and critiques are most welcome! Let me start off first:

the large, full-res version (which is not uploaded) is rather

disappointing because of 1) hand-shake, 2) not enough depth of field

on the dragonfly, 3) high-noise levels (ISO1600). I need to try harder :P

Jeremy Preece: "I think it's necessary sometimes to manipulate the scene in order to capture the image we can only dream of."

Manipulate background, manipulate lighting, manipulate position, manipulate in Photoshop, yes... but to manipulate something that goes against the very nature of things is not really ethical in my opinion. I'm not an animal activist, let alone an insect activist, but I doubt a dragonfly is a natural prey of a mantis and to "force feed" it one and take a picture of it is perhaps akin to a restaurant selling foie gras. Yes, the end-result (for both this picture and for the foie gras dish) is pleasing and beautiful, but the process to get there is perhaps not acceptable to quite a few people.

If the photographer had used Photoshop to bring two composite images of a dragonfly and the mantis together and had clearly stated so, I would have no problem with that image. Clearly no insects will be harmed in the making of the picture when you use Photoshop. But in this case, a dragonfly was harmed, and what was even less acceptable was that it was fed to the mantis, whose natural food pyramid probably does not include dragonflies (I'll retract this statement if a naturalist says otherwise). It does not depict a scene in actual reality and people who do not know about dragonflies or mantisses will go away after looking at this picture, believing that mantisses eat dragonflies when this is not true. Pictures are very powerful, but I would think this kind of photography is "abuse" to make your photographic fantasies met.

It is a great capture no doubt, but unfortunately it suffers the same fate as the LA Times photo of the solider guarding Iraqi civilians.

Took this shot using my just acquired 100mm macro lens at Phipps

Conservatory where they were having an orchid display. Comments and

critiques most welcome! :)