Manipulating Images with Photoshop

Our assignment was to take an image and manipulate it in photoshop. I've never used photoshop before, but I think it's an okay first attempt. Since my research is on the tribe Cyclecephalini, I used an image of a species within this group.

Here is the original image of Cyclocephala marginalis:


First I sharpened the image and played around with a few other tweaking features. Then, I cut the image of the beetle out and made the background transparent. Here is the result:


Finally, for fun, I took an image of my son and added the beetle to it. I was trying to make him look apprehensive about it, but it only sort of works as the two images don't seem to blend very well. Still, it was fun.