It is a morpho wing, found on the ground, undoubtedly the remains of a jacamar's meal. It was a glorious object glowing in the brown leaves. It's taken at f5 with diffused TTL flash. A Raynox 150 close-up lens was attached. Maybe this was over-sharpened, but it does capture the brilliant contrastiness and sparkliness of the wing as seen in that dark understory.
Its organic nature seemed to catch the interest of many passing ants, and one with its monster gaping jaws paused long enough for me to get a picture. Because the ant was very dark and the scales are brilliantly shiny, I used HDR to combine different renderings of a single RAW image to get this image.
I also did it manually, using the proper rendering for the ant as the base, and then using the proper rendering for the morpho wing as a layer on top. I then manually erased the ant in the top layer, exposing the brighter ant in the base layer.
