Slug

ziggy53

Hopefully, this image stands on its own, but there's a back story too.

Back in June I was taking care of my daughter's dog while she was out of town. I just had him outside to do his business and when he came in I wiped off his paws with an old washcloth. It's not unusual for him to bring in some grass clippings on his paws, but this time I noticed something very small on the washcloth, ... and it was moving.

This time he had picked up a very small garden slug, about twice the size of a grain of rice. The little thing must have been really scared because it was moving quickly (for a slug) and leaving a copious slime trail.

I grabbed my trusty Canon 40D, put on the Tamron 90mm macro lens, set the aperture to f11 and used a flash with a scoop attached. The slug had just reversed direction when I shot this, about to go back on its trail.

The only real problem was that the shot was still rather ordinary. I wanted the image to convey something of what I figured the slug must have been feeling. I wanted to show the slug's world, scary and dangerous.

Yesterday, I bumped into a wonderful plugin for the GIMP called G'MIC. Within G'MIC is a filter called "Rodilius", which can do things visually similar to "Fractilius" by Redfield. Playing with Rodilius, this image looked like a good candidate for a treatment.

It's not all good news. Rodilius is horrible at memory management and I had to reduce the image size before it would even run. Still, I'm rather pleased with the results.

Here is the link to G'MIC:

http://gmic.sourceforge.net/gimp.shtml

PS: This was a catch and release image. No slugs were harmed in the making of this image. :wink