Thanks a lot to colleagues who reviewed "Assassin". I made this photo last month, after accidentally finding the bug while looking for spiders in my mother's garden. It was my first time to see this thing -- what a lucky day. Possibly rare species. The size of the insect is about 1/5 of the online version. To photograph it, I enclosed it with a Hoya 82mm UV filter, which I then placed in a freezer for about five minutes, to keep the bug still, since it was kind of restless when I caught it and it couldn't understand the command "Freeze!" :) It was walking upside-down on the filter wall for awhile. But when it was still, I took the filter with the bug out in bright shade and took several shots. I reckoned later that it would have been better to put the bug in a carton box instead, and to keep the filter out of the freezer, because tiny water droplets developed on the filter during the process. You can see the result on the lowest, "left" hind leg: On the corner of the elbow there is a circular thing, apparently caused by a droplet, which magnified that portion when it touched the glass. Biologists might suspect this is a mutation, but it's absent in the other frames because the droplet dried up quickly. I'd like to know how other photographers would handle this kind of subject. How cold should the freezer be? I was afraid the bug would die, but it did recover despite several reentry. When it started moving, I turned the filter up, exposing the bug to open air, and in seconds, it buzzed its wings and before I could press the shutter again it just zipped away. Elson -- KINDELEN ENTERPRISES http://cdo.weblinq.com/~kindelen/
