This one certainly fits the nursery rhyme. Overall, I like the translucent appearance of the spider’s cephalothorax and the body and basal portion of the legs are nice and sharp. The sepia color of the BG makes the BG apparent, but subtle to the viewer. There’s a subtle graininess to the image and its very uniform without being a distraction. If your intension was deliberate, then I see no issue with having it throughout the image as presented. Interesting shot and it fits the story for sure…Jim
Thanks for comments - it was really just stacking practice. The BG was a quick snap of the kettle in the kitchen and then sepia toned and pushed into the background - it I think was rather two enthusiastic grain and sepia sliders in Silver effex.
Just about any background would have been better - but this attempt was very tongue in cheek
Pleased about the stack though - shot through front door glass from inside with lens on about 3x and the background was a messy garden , it was so out of focus that it was just non descript.
Obviously tripod and rail and natural light, me inside in the warm and spider mm off the glass in the cold.
Cephalothorax was amazing to see - macro definitely shows amazingly complex structures in the insect world. And presumably eyes on stalks too!
I am definitely motivated to keep stacking tripod and hand held.
Please forgive the BG - just humour and hysteria after a bit of a long haul babysitting 4 yr old grandkids
Regards
Huw: No need to apologize for the BG, IMO it’s genius and very complementary to the subject. The details in the spider are flat out marvelous so your stack worked out well. I’ve posed this question to Mark Seaver who is a stacking wizard and I’ll pose it to @Jim_Zablotny here regarding taking stacking images by adjusting the focal point with the lens and camera at a fixed distance vs moving the camera on a rail with the focus fixed at a certain distance. Does either technique produce better results? This capture no matter how you accomplished it is flat out terrific.>=))>
@Bill_Fach , that is a darn good question and I found an explanation in an article from Photography Life: What is Focus Breathing and How You Can Mitigate It . When we focus through an object during image generation for stacking, the magnification and frame area change from near to far focusing and this phenomena is called focus breathing. This is caused by moving the internal lenses and it alters the optical behavior of the lens optics. All macro lenses have a fair degree of focus peaking while focusing at close objects. Moving the entire rig on a focusing rail should give better results because the lens optics are set at a single focus point. Some lenses like shorter focal length lenses may have negligible focus breathing. Lenses designed for shooting movies are designed to reduce the “zooming-like” effect of focus peaking. My guess is that the stacking software we use also have algorithms that minimize the perspective and magnification changes from focus breathing. I think that using a rail should produce better stacking results versus using the focus ring. Somewhere in my bag of tricks, I have a focusing rail and should give that a try on my next flower shoot…Jim
Jim: My camera doesn’t do auto-stacking or whatever it’s termed where the camera does the incremental images. While using a rail might be theoretically better I wonder if it would be a lot harder to make super fine adjustments. I have a rail and primarily use it for when I go to really high magnification (my Sony 100mm goes to 2.8x with the 2xTC aboard) on really small and close details. I haven’t tried using it for a stack. Perhaps my next experiment as well. >=))>
