Male Lasius Ant Portrait

acerola · Post by **acerola** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 2:34 am

This ant is a winged ant. It is quite small relative to the female. Its size is much like the workers. We just discussed it the other day with lauriek. Because he photographed a queen ant from this species.
I mentioned that males has a little different head. They have more angular shaped head and all their eyes are quite big (including ocelli). I think they need their sight to the flying and finding the females.

I blurred the antenna because I made less frame there. It sticked out very much.
Canon 40D + Nicon 10x objective on extension, 52 frames, TuFuse Pro

lauriek · Post by **lauriek** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 2:00 pm

Ahh l like that! Completely different looking to the queen!

Sometimes those antenna can be a real pain!!

I also caught one of these yesterday. I found a couple of nests 'swarming' with two sizes of flying ants coming out. One the same as the one I photographed the other week which we established was a queen (with a big fat head) and some much smaller ones, around the size of a worker ant. It's in the freezer now, I'll probably have a go at stacking him at the weekend...

acerola · Post by **acerola** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 12:49 am

In this case the antenna sticked out so much that it would required bigger distance than the rest of the picture. I did not want to shot 50-60 pictures just to the antenna.

I'm waiting for your version.

lauriek · Post by **lauriek** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 4:12 am

I was in exactly the same boat with a small long-legged fly recently, I'd shot about 120 images to get the face and eyes nicely done and worked out it would take me another 120-150 shots to get one antenna all in focus so I just missed it off!!

Do I understand correctly that you shot the antennae but with wider shot intervals, hence only getting small slices in focus, then you blurred the whole antennae to give an all slightly OOF effect?

I'll try to do something at the weekend!

acerola · Post by **acerola** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 5:30 am

Yes I do it from about 10-15 frames. And the blurring gives the picture a little depth.