Off With The Old

I imaged this Cicada shed nymph case where the adult Cicada emerged from this case. The nymph lived underground and before emerging came out from underground, crawled up the tree trunk, crawled out a branch. and crawled out to this leaf. If you view this nymph case large, you will see the dried mud still coating the outside of the case from when this nymph lived underground. This nymph was a member of the 2013 Magicicada Brood II and was imaged in the parking lot of Poet's Walk (park) in Red Hook, New York, USA, on July 05, 2013. There were quite a few active adults in the trees and the sounds, to me, sounded like what you might hear if you were operating an electric weed wacker. For this image, I used my manual focus Tamron Adaptall-2 model 52BB SP 90mm f2.5 macro lens and Tamron Adaptall-2 18f 1:1tube with attached Tamron Adaptall-2 Pentax K A mount on Pentax K20D camera, hand held, manually focused, ISO 100, Shake Reduction set to 300mm focal length, f13 on lens, 1/180 sec, with fill-in flash from camera's built-in electronic flash. This is a less than 1:1 close-up. This is a full resolution Large JPEG and is Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC) and is without any post-processing, editing, adjusting, cropping, or re-sizing.