t’s hard to believe this is a sentient creature, and that the Creator, in the same breath, also made hummingbirds, ballerinas, and tulips! Nevertheless, we share our planet with this 5-horned rhinoceros beetle, native to Southeast Asia. It is the most bizarre and outrageous living thing I’ve ever seen or photographed, and knowing these insects exist might give you pause when contemplating a walk through tropical rainforests in Asia. It’s not that they are dangerous; they just might scare you to death. Thank God these are not the size of a 5-story building! This is a 3-photo composite. I used focus stacking to photograph the beetle, and what you see here is a 14-frame composite to insure the entire armor-plated body was tack sharp. I then made a careful selection of the insect using Topaz Mask AI and, using Photoshop, pasted it onto the log (which is really a tree photo rotated 90 degrees). I added the sharp tropical background to give a sense of environment, and finally I used the burn tool to strategically darken portions of the log to suggest a shadow beneath the subject.
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