Exploration

[Calpurnius]

I shot this while walking in the forest yesterday.

[Dazyl]

That's a good shot of an ant -- shadow and all! I have a lot of trouble photographing these little critters, so in my opinion, capturing him at all is a triumph.

The light on the leaf and ant is excellent. The leaf in the background, though not blown out, is enough brighter as to be distracting, unfortunately.

The composition / framing has potential, but I can't tell whether you have any room to play. Is the photo already at full zoom/crop? If not, I'd suggest cropping out roughly the left 1/3 and the top 1/4. The dark area on the left can be an interesting part of the composition, but there's a bit too much of it right now.

Well seen!

[Teewinot]

Great sharpness on the ant. Crisp...likely very difficult to attain...nice job! Good light too, as Dazyl pointed out.

A comment on the background...actually when I first saw it I wondered whether your photo was a shot of an ant on a houseplant in your house. The background looks 'indoorsy' to me for some reason...like that overexposed leaf is a table or something. So, this was a forest walk therefore I assume you'd like it to come off that way...cropping is an option as is cloning. Haha, I must say, however, that it could be just be me thinking that the background looks like the inside of a house because we are fighting ants at my house right now and they crawl on my plants...weird how the mind works sometimes...

Anyways, great shot nonetheless and no matter what the background looks like, it does steal the eye from the star of your photo due to the brightness...I would experiment and see what you can come up with. Thanks for sharing! I wish I could get such sharp detail on my insect shots!