MY NEWEST CRITTER FRIEND--
and a little technical chat about photography

This little lady (or fellow, your choice?) landed on the windshield of my car as I was preparing to leave home one recent morning and presented me with a view of a grasshopper seldom seen.  After pondering its presence for a moment I decided to go back in the house and retrieve a camera.

It did not move as I slid gently back behind the wheel and examined it through the 100 mm, f/2.8 Canon micro lens on my old Canon XTi Rebel body.

As I have mentioned in previous macro photos an inherent challenge in this type of photography is the very shallow depth of field (aka depth of focus).  Note the one antenna, the head, body and parts of some walking legs are in very sharp focus.

That's because they are in the same plane or same distance from the camera.  Any part of the critter closer to the camera from that plane or farther from the camera are out of focus in proportion to their distance from that plane.

Note the diagonal jumping leg on its abdomen.  While it is barely 1/8 of an inch from the plane of its body it is becoming fuzzy.  This is even more noticable with the second antenna.  Same with the walking legs.  Those under the critter to the rear are sharply focused enough to see the hair on the legs.  The three forward of that are not.

The photo was done at 1/160th of a second and f/2.8.  I was sitting in an awkward position and had to use a fairly fast shutter speed to keep the image from being blurred by camera movement.  That forced me to use the lens' minimum aperture to be correctly exposed.

The dark green background is nothing more than the woods surrounding my home thrown completely out of focus because the trees are relatively far from the zone of sharp focus, and they are mostly under exposed because they are much darker than the critter which had the advantage of indirect skylight for its illumination.

If this critter were a biological specimen (not alive) the photo could have been done on a piece of glass in a studio with the camera supported on a tripod.  With supplemental lighting a much smaller aperture, say f/22 or so, could have been used with a much longer shutter speed to increase the depth of field and achieve overall sharpness..

A higher ISO (sensitivity setting) could have been selected which can help with the shutter speed/aperture equation but that sometimes increases electronic noise in the image.  That's akin to pushing film to higher sensitivity which creates graininess.

It occurs to me, somehow, taking a picture of a mere grasshopper shouldn't be quite this technical.

But, I am pleased to report it went merrily on its way as I began to move the car--with my gratitude, of course.