Trade Secrets: 'It was a wet and stormy day...'

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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2007-01-25

Trade Secrets: 'It was a wet and stormy day...'
Robin Loznak's macro photograph is next in a series of SportsShooter.com features called "Trade Secrets."

By Robin Loznak, The Great Falls Tribune

Photo by Robin Loznak / The Great Falls Tribune

An ant drinks from raindrops gathered on a leaf in at Gibson Park in Great Falls, Montana.

I have always enjoyed macro, or in Nikon speak, micro photography. For years I have used an ancient manual focus 55mm micro-nikkor. In fact, I have had two ancient manual focus 55mm micro-nikkors. The first one fell into pieces in my hands a few years ago. I got the second one on eBay for about $50. I recently purchased a slightly less ancient, but still manual focus, 105mm micro-nikkor with a PN-11 extension tube on eBay. I paid $210 for both items. I can get in super close with the setup. I'm not a techno expert but with the extension tube I think I'm shooting at a 1:1 ratio or better. The extension tube allows me to back off a bit from the subject. Good for snakes and bugs. I hand held a Nikon D2Hs with an SB800 speedlight held off camera using a synch cord.

I shot the picture in a flower garden at Paris Gibson Park in Great Falls, Montana. A few days earlier, the day I received the lens, I took it to the park and noticed the spectacular water droplets on the same plant. The tiny hairs on the waxy leaves held the rain drops in place. At some angles the droplets glimmered like diamonds. I took a few shots, but I had another assignment and I didn't notice any ants. The water drops were pretty, but not very interesting.

A few days later it was raining again. In fact, we were getting lots of rain and a couple of local streams were thinking about flooding. The rain was becoming news so I headed out looking for rain features. I shot a few people-walking-with-objects-over-their-heads photos, but the rain tapered off. Always thinking, I headed to the park and the flower garden.

After I noticed a few ants on the leaves I spent about an hour crouched and sitting in the flowerbed. The plants with the water drops cover an area about the size of a kitchen table. Ants must have good vision, because the bigger ones would make a dash for cover when they saw my movement. The smaller rice sized ants, like the one in the picture, seemed fairly oblivious to me. While I was chasing ants a group of elderly painters showed up with their easels. I wonder if any of their paintings included a man squatting in the greenery.

The pictures turned out better than I expected. It ran as the lead art on the front page of the next day's Great Falls Tribune. I moved the picture on the Associated Press wire. Several news websites, like washingtonpost.com and usatoday.com used the image in their pictures of the day's section. I'm a frequent contributor to the AP wire. Many of my quirky animal features and human-interest pictures have run in newspapers and on websites worldwide. In Montana photographers working for AP member papers used to get $15 for each photo we offered to the wire. They recently terminated the payment for single pictures and they now pay members through a monthly AP Montana Picture of the Month program. I won the first monthly award in December of 2006 for a picture from a Marine funeral.

The image has minimal Photoshop work. I did a bit of dodging and burning and levels adjustments. I shot the image at maximum magnification, but I still cropped off about half of the frame. Maybe I should invest in an ancient manual focus microscope for super micro photography.

Robin Loznak is the Photo Editor at The Great Falls Tribune in Montana.

"Trade Secrets" is a series of educational features where SportsShooter.com members reveal the inside-information about how they were able to create a specific image (or two.) To nominate an image for this feature, please send a message to the SportsShooter.com admin staff here: http://www.sportsshooter.com/contactus.html The SportsShooter.com admin staff reserves the right to accept, or not accept, any nomination.

Related Links:

Robin's member page

The Great Falls Tribune