The making of the Dangling Spider

Freshly spurred on by a recent afternoon spent taking pictures of Spiders with other members of our local camera club I wanted to try and take things up a notch.  I had in mind a macro picture of a Spider dangling from a single gossamer thread against an all black backdrop, looking like it had descended at night and was only lit by the moon.

Hmm, ok where to start! I managed to find a Spider that would do the job, one of those fat ones in the garden with a white cross on its back, they seem to make a web almost on demand and with a small stick you an carefully catch the web and lift it, and the Spider into the air.

But how to light it (remember its at night) , how to focus on it (its macro so shallow DOF) and how to freeze it so it is sharp when it will be moving, as may its appendages be.

I came up with a solution, and made a video showing how it was done, its only a couple of minutes long and I hope you like it (literally "like" it :-) ).

One of the resulting images

You can view more images here just search on "spider"

The Photo Trigger was supplied by High Speed Photography UK and the "spare pair of hands" are from Amazon, amazing value at less than £5 each, I use them loads.

Cheers Peter.

Mystery Solved,

Many thanks to Jeff Morgan of PhotoPlus magazine for spotting that my camera was in Exposure Simulation mode, which was why the screen was black and then went back to normal with the Flash raised.

I think it goes like this, I had an f-stop of 11 and a shutter speed of 100 (this was to stay well below the shutter sync speed, and give a reasonable depth of field), so naturally the image would be very dark, which wasnt a problem as I was using Flash.  However as I had Exposure Simulation on, the camera was showing me what my final image woiuld look like (without flash), i.e. black.

However Exposure Simulation  seems to be switched off when you raise the internal flash.  In fact if you look at the two images in my last Blog post on the topic, you can see that the "Exp SIM" (bottom right corner of the camera screen) is greyed out on the image with the flash up.  So the camera shows the scene without any attempt at simulating the exposure so its clearly visible.

Exposure simulation can be set on or off through the menu system, so no need to mess around with the internal flash at all.

Thanks Jeff.

Peter.


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Live View Macro tip

One of the great things for me about photography is the way you can experiment and get unexpected results.  I've recently been doing a bit more macro stuff see The Wasp here and have been playing around with extension tubes and extenders.

A boon to Macro shooting on my Canon 7D, is LiveView as it allows you to move the point of focus to exactly where you want it, and with some of the shallow DOF's Macro work has, this is essential and easier done in LiveView than peering through the viewfinder.

This is fine if you are working with continuous light (maybe LEDs), but using external Flash, the Liveview screen is black, even with the modelling lights on.  (see below).

However, I found accidentally that if you pop up the on camera flash whilst in LiveView, for some reason (not sure why, happy to hear from someone more knowledgeable why this works) the camera recalibrates and the subject is clearly visible.



















This means that you have access to the LiveView ability to zoom in tight and get focussed where you want to be, lock everything down, lower the flash, carefully put the external flash trigger into the hotshoe and start snapping.

Oh and if you'd like to see what I was snapping its Here.

Cheers, Peter.


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Flowers, not that easy

For a challenge I decided to try taking pictures of a flower sprayed with water.  I purchased a bunch of flowers, with some exotic types in it for us to work with and armed with a couple of LED lights, off we went. 

It soon became clear that to do them justice was not going to be as simple as I thought.  I deleted all of mine! the best one is here so you can imagine what the others were like!

I used a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens, but somehow was not getting the results I wanted.

 

I'll have to read up on technique and have another go at it.

In other news I put my first "tip" video on to Youtube the other day. 

I'd been helping a friend with a shot of some flying Gannets he'd taken on the Farnes Islands.  It was a great shot but there was a gap in the shot where there were no birds and it looked odd.  We tried slecting birds and pasting them in but that didn't look right.  Somehow we found that you can use the Patch tool in Photoshop CS5, in reverse and in this case got perfectly blended birds to fill the empty space.  It was particularly pleasing as it took seconds and blended the different shades of sky perfectly.

You can see what I mean on the video here on a shot of Manx Shearwaters flying in Wales.

So if you have any tips on taking flower pictures, or comments on the video clip, please let me know.

Cheers, Peter.

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Locusts!!!!!!!!

Now the nights have drawn in, the opportunities for photography are reduced.  So, wanting something to do, I purchased a tub of locusts from a local pet shop (that was a strange moment, "what type of reptile do you have?" um...... ).

I invited some friends over and we set up one studio light with softbox, a twig, a co-operative locust and spent the evening trying Macro photography. 

I used a Canon 100mm 2.8 Macro lens I bought earlier this year, but had used more for portraits than macro. 

Its really not that easy to get good results, getting a sharp image is one thing, getting a good composition whilst getting a sharp image is another thing altogether.

Still I enjoyed the effort, and am happy with the results, though can't help feeling there's a killer shot I haven't figured out yet!

Work in progress.

Quick tip, if you try this yourself, you might want to put them in the refrigerator for a few minutes to slow them down a bit.

You can see some more on my photostream Flickr