Breakfast with Spidey

bret

I found this guy early this AM finishing off a moth. He ate the whole thing, saving the head for last. I guess that's like dessert for spiders.



This particular spider builds a web every night in the same spot outside my sliding glass door on the back porch. It's hard to photograph without a cluttered background so I taped a piece of blue construction paper to the window behind the web for a studio backdrop effect.
Duct tape and construction paper .... the cornerstone of every good photo kit.
I even experimented using different colors, but liked this result the best.

Also, I tried doing some focus stacking for increased DOF so this pic is actually a composite of about 5 images. You can see where the web gets a little sloppy in some spots. I just stacked the shots manually using layer masking in Photoshop.

I used two flashes for this shot. The on-camera flash was bounced off the ceiling above while an off-camera flash provided most of the light.
The difficulty was in holding the camera in the right places since I wasn't using a tripod. I really need to get some focusing rails!

Canon 5D2, 65mm MP-E Macro
1/100, f/16, ISO 800

-bret

jpc

Great stack, but I'm not in love with the blue. I would think that the background would be too far out of focus to be distracting, no?

bret

jpc wrote:

I would think that the background would be too far out of focus to be distracting, no?

You'd think so, but since the spider is only a few inches away it is still distracting. To me, anyway.

Lord Vetinari

Good one- stack worked well
Brian V.

jpc

I see what you mean. Sometimes underexposing kills the background while using the flash to light the subject. I've had some success with that method.

Slowhand

I'm not crazy about the background either, I think it is unnatural and too uniform. I often use and old picture or poster with some vegetation far out of focus in the background to give it a mottled effect.

bret

jpc wrote:

I see what you mean. Sometimes underexposing kills the background while using the flash to light the subject. I've had some success with that method.

The problem in this case is that since the background is only a few inches from the subject it is being lit by the flash as well.

I guess I'll have to train Spidey to build his web further from the house.

bret

Slowhand wrote:

I'm not crazy about the background either, I think it is unnatural and too uniform. I often use and old picture or poster with some vegetation far out of focus in the background to give it a mottled effect.

That's a good idea. I figured I'd try a solid color for my first attempt to create sort of a green screen effect that can be easily replaced in post-processing.



Ok, maybe not.