I awoke this morning to a heavy fog, wishing I had the ambition to go pursue images in such a photogenic atmosphere, my daughter called me to see a dew covered spider web in front of the house.
I used the live view, view finder on the D850 for the first time (I’ve had this camera body for a little over a week now). I had to get very low to avoid some background distractions. Without the articulating view screen, I would have been laying on my belly in mud and water. I didn’t realize how useful the movable screen could be in getting difficult perspectives.
It would be nice to have had some item of focus, but as simple as this image is, I find it pleasing to me. I’ve never taken an image like this before. Thinking of ways to make a dew covered spider web such as this really special. . .
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David, this is not bad for a first of this type of image, as it isn’t an easy one to achieve, and to have been shooting with a new camera as well. To me there are a couple of things. It seems a bit flat, so I downloaded it into LR and tried a few things, and I wasn’t doing so well with improving the image, so won’t even bother posting it.
I think the droplets are blown out, as I couldn’t dull down the brightness in them, so I think the camera was exposing to the darker background, so if you had pushed the exposure compensation over to the right (+) a notch or so, would have helped with that.
You didn’t mention if you were using a tripod. Almost a must with a shot like this.
You probably didn’t need such a fast shutter speed, which would have lowered the ISO, or given you the option to raise your f-stop number a bit. It is nice having the background as smooth as you have it, so depending on how far the background was away from the web as to how much you would change that.
I still think you did a great job considering this is your first try at capturing the pearls. Maybe the web will stay there for the next rain and you can try again.
Thank you so much. You are correct. Yes the waterdroplet highlights are blown. I did not use a tripod. Last evening my tripod broke. One of the legs no longer locks. . . lol. . . so, I have a new tripod on order, but this was hand held. Truthfully I had never taken a fog spider web before and I had no idea how it would turn out. Maybe no surprise to anyone else, but the camera would not focus on the web. I had to hand focus it, and the camera was still set up in manual mode for the bird flight pictures that I had been taking the evening before. Thank you again for your tips.
Hi David, I think that Shirley makes some very good points, so I would just like to add that overall this strikes me as an really pleasing image, almost abstract, of these ephemeral creations
Well done for being handheld. If you get the opportunity again you might consider a stacked image. Yes it would probably require a fair amount of editing to eliminate ghosting. But you would achieve increased clarity and more control of your exposure. Since you have a D 850, you can let the camera do the work. If you’ve never done this before you’ll need some stacking software that works better than Photoshop.
David, this is an outstanding collection of drops on a web. The heavy covering of drops and uniform sizes only occur in or after a heavy fog. There looks to be the same degree of sharpness throughout the frame, which is also hard to get. You might try some heavy burning-in of the background, with all of the bright drops, that might make for a very dramatic and somewhat abstract look.
