Zorak the Mantis is Still Growing

I came in to work today and I noticed that he got bigger. He must have molted throughout the night and now he’s about an inch long or so. It’s a shame that they only live for about a year. It would be awesome to have a huge mantis as a long-term pet. I would put a mini harness on him and bring him around with me as long as he promised not to nibble on my face. I bet that’d feel pretty damn weird.

Today I got to test out my bosses new camera so I took a bunch of images of him. This is kind of a mini-review for The NIKON D600 Digital SLR Camera,
Lens I used: 70-200mm f/2.8
Exposure Settings for this image: 1/200 sec; f/3.5; ISO 800

I shot some images in RAW and JPEG to see test the quality difference. I really prefer the editing features of the RAW photos, there’s so much more data in those images that you can really fine tune the image during editing. I just wish my screens were calibrated better. As for the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, I don’t know how I feel about it. It’s a great lens but not good for shooting anything macro. I had to stand about 5ft back just to focus in on Zorak. However, since it wouldn’t zoom in any closer, I had to actually zoom in digitally to focus and during editing in order to make it look like I was zoomed in real close. Speaking of Zoom, I called up one of my colleagues and showed them the image, and also flaunted the new zoom background I’d gotten. Here is the actual image to show how it looked before editing. Good thing it’s a high def image, but a macro shot would have been 10x more amazing. I have resized this image to 1024px so that it can be viewed easier on most screens.