Found this spider yesterday morning, sleeping I think. . ., it was 63 degrees, dew point was 63 and the humidity was 99% . . . .absolutely could not resist trying to get some shots of the dew drops on this web.
Since the spider was asleep, or simply just waiting for breakfast to come along, my thought was to try and get as much in focus without stacking. Even though the wind was only 2mph, the effect on the web turned out to be more than I could handle.
Since the web kept moving, I kept increasing the ISO and increasing the SS, which resulted in an aperture of f/7.1. Clearly I should have had my external flash to help and thought I’d give that a try today. . .however, web and spider were totally gone today. . .my loss.
D7200, f/7.1, 1/250sec., iso 1000, 100mm. Cropped 3:2, did a luminosity mask to darken the background a bit.
Any thoughts, comments and suggestions on how improve this would be appreciated and welcome. Thanks.
Wow, what a nice find, Linda. Love how you captured the droplets of water on the web. It looks like the face of the spider is soft, so maybe your POF was more on the top of the spider (when looking through the viewfinder it is hard to tell which way is up). I love the composition on this, and the oof BG. Maybe you took more than the one shot and have the face sharper in another image. Hope so.
Thanks Shirley. Since the spider was “huddled/or sleep” I was definitely more focused on the water droplets. And yes, I was hoping to get a better photo of the spider the next day, but it was gone. Keeping my eye out for my next opportunity though.
Linda: I hear you on trying to maintain focus on webs even in the slightest zephyr. For me the DOF works pretty well and I especially like the refractions in the larger drops. Good effort, good result. >=))>
Linda, getting a large section of a spider web in focus is very difficult even when there’s no wind, since there’s often curvature in the web itself. You did very well here. The drops coming in from the left are outstanding, especially that big one. The spider is also nice and sharp. Don’t be put off from using even smaller apertures (depending on the background) and higher ISO. The extra noise from higher ISO can often be cleaned up in RAW processing.
Thanks Mark. . . .just as a experimental comparison. . .the spider/web were back today. I set up my tripod, setting at f/14, 1/1600sec., iso 3200 (set on auto with a max of 3200), no flash, cropped 1:1. Post: LR adjusted sharpening, noise reduction; PS added curve layer
When I use “auto ISO” the camera seems to default to the highest setting I’ve picked. Do you typically set a limit to how high you want your ISO? I do think this image is better, but will be waiting for the spider to return.
