As I was walking along, I was on the lookout for any bugs. At one point, I looked at this decaying log and saw this absolutely tiny bright red dot crawling about. I got down closer and noticed it was a bug of some sort - it had eight legs but didn't look like a spider.

I took maybe half a dozen shots, and ended up only keeping one (others were in focus and decent shots, but the subject was not facing the right way or didn't line up as well as this shot).

It turns out, this is probably a Red Velvet Mite. When I say it was tiny, I mean it. If my measurements and math are correct (using the Exit data saying that my subject distance was 0.29m which would be 1:1 magnification on my 100 f/2.8L lens), it was about 2.5-3mm long.

Below are the original and a cropped version. If you look closely, you can see an additional even tinier arthropod a small distance above the mite's front right leg (in the cropped version, it is just below the top edge of the frame).

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/250 sec at f/11. Canon Speedlight 580EX II flash in auto mode and wireless control. Image Stabilization on. ISO 200. RAW processing and cropped in Adobe Camera Raw. Trillium Trails, Fox Chapel, PA.

Sorry if that freaked anybody out, but I really like the challenge of working on such tiny subjects.

- Bill