Meet the Mantids

I took some shots of some pet mantis’s on Friday evening.  Currently we have 4 mantis’s, all of different types.  After shooting them (indoors on a table with a small amount of moss/leaves as background), the following shots were found to be the better ones.  Hope to shoot them again outside in some natural light soon, which I think will look even better.  I finished off by creating a couple of montages from the shots, which I will show you first.

This first one is my favourite, mainly due to it’s simplicity, I also think it looks a bit like a movie alien poster.  I can’t claim to be original on this as I did see another mantis keepers shots done similarly last year.

This one is the second montage, with all four of them in it.

Now for some shots, all taken at ISO 400 – 1/250sec F11 with Flash.  The head closeups are on my MPE-65mm, the others all on the Canon 100mm Macro lens.

Firstly some of the Ghost Mantis.

Then the Springbok Mantis

The Dead Leaf Mantis

The Twig Mantis

The last shot of the twig mantis is in fact a four shot panoramic stitch.  I used the free Hugin Software to stitch these together.