Judges Comments

You had the opportunity here to produce a great image. The mantis was in an interesting position and the background allowed you to make it stand out. However, your choice of aperture was wrong. With a 105mm lens, f10 was never going to give you sufficient depth of field to get enough of the mantis in focus from your chosen shooting direction. With images of this type, out of focus parts of the subject are very obvious because the main purpose is to show the intricate details.