Back in May when I was experimenting with my CULs, I took hundreds of shots of ants on matches and this was one of them with two ants on the same match being obliging for my camera simultaneously. Gotta be happy with that! This one was on 7 May and I created Matchmaker with the water reflections on 21 May.

There's a trade-off between illuminating the ants for sufficient detail and blowing the highlights in the reflective wood of the match. In this case, I was more interested in the ants, so I sacrificed the match to get the ant detail I wanted. The next flash level down was not enough. Knowing what I now do, I could have used a single layer of tissue over my camera's flash (not both layers) to attenuate the flash level a bit. I could then have readjusted WB if I'd wanted to, although neutral WB is academic in an image like this that doesn't include the match head or anything else that provides a known colour reference for anyone having a look.