Chasing Macros - Natural Light

Went out last Saturday morning, hoping to chase down some insects to get some macros out of them. Here are some of the results. Will try to walk you through my thought process and my mistakes etc.. First, noted this ant running on a small flower and tried chasing it around. Got as low as I could by laying on the ground.... Even though I got the focus on this right, the aperture was set at f/4, which is not quite enough.

To be honest, I almost stepped on this little guy.. Just noticed him silently enjoying the sun on a small flower.. Had a little better DOF on this one.. but should have gone for more.

Got this rare shot where a spider (usually a predator) becomes the prey. Had a real hard time getting everything in focus (DOF) while keeping a fast enough shutter to get some light (which was not consistent) and blur from the flower flailing in the wind. ISO was boosted up to cope with it.. and the cheap ring flash I had was no help as my lens could focus far away from the subject. Even with an aperture of f/10, most of the predator is out of focus.

This is in fact, the best shot I had. It was so hard to catch this one, who never stopped for a breather. My auto focus (selective) was going crazy no matter what I do to get him in focus. Tried a few and then switched to manual.. here, I had more control over the shot and also could use my intuition to predict where the bee is gonna move into etc... Out of the 5-6 shots I took this way, had 2 presentable ones.. Here s one of them.

Please note that All Images are Copyrighted.

Comments and suggestions are always welcomed.

Akila.