Preparing Dinner
As I stepped out onto the deck, I noticed a spider that has been patiently producing webs these past two weeks in on sheltered corner, had successfully managed to capture a small fly (?) and was engaged in encapsulating it in silk, presumably for later consumption. The direction from which I had approached the spider showed him/her up against a bright begonia just behind it and that induced me to capture it like that, on a bright orange background. You are looking at the spider's underside as it is working on the fly. Still working on getting insect-level macro skills up to where I want to be but I kind of liked this. - JW
Date Taken: 2015-09-11
Tech Details:
Taken using tripod-mounted Nikon D7100 fitted with a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 Macro lense and Nikon SB600 flash, Auto WB, Manual Exposure mode, f/8.0, 1/125 sec (based on test shot to get background exposure the way I liked), flash on iTTL mode and reflected off a large white sheet above and right of framed area to get bounce flash rather than direct on subject. PP in free Open Source RAWTherapee from Nikon RAW/NEF source file: resize to 6000x9000 pixels, leave White Balance on camera set value, slightly increase exposure, decrease vibrance slightly (background was saturating), apply noise reduction, save. PP in free Open Source GIMP: use hue-saturation-brightness tool to select the red channel and slightly decrease that channel's saturation and brightness, burn the upper background area to darken it a bit and suppress the residual green colour, sharpen, save, scale to 4000x6000 pixels (my preferred working size for prepping an image for online use), add fine black and white frame, add bar and text on left, save, scale to 1800 pixels vertical for posting.
Preparing Dinner
As I stepped out onto the deck, I noticed a spider that has been patiently producing webs these past two weeks in on sheltered corner, had successfully managed to capture a small fly (?) and was engaged in encapsulating it in silk, presumably for later consumption. The direction from which I had approached the spider showed him/her up against a bright begonia just behind it and that induced me to capture it like that, on a bright orange background. You are looking at the spider's underside as it is working on the fly. Still working on getting insect-level macro skills up to where I want to be but I kind of liked this. - JW
Date Taken: 2015-09-11
Tech Details:
Taken using tripod-mounted Nikon D7100 fitted with a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 Macro lense and Nikon SB600 flash, Auto WB, Manual Exposure mode, f/8.0, 1/125 sec (based on test shot to get background exposure the way I liked), flash on iTTL mode and reflected off a large white sheet above and right of framed area to get bounce flash rather than direct on subject. PP in free Open Source RAWTherapee from Nikon RAW/NEF source file: resize to 6000x9000 pixels, leave White Balance on camera set value, slightly increase exposure, decrease vibrance slightly (background was saturating), apply noise reduction, save. PP in free Open Source GIMP: use hue-saturation-brightness tool to select the red channel and slightly decrease that channel's saturation and brightness, burn the upper background area to darken it a bit and suppress the residual green colour, sharpen, save, scale to 4000x6000 pixels (my preferred working size for prepping an image for online use), add fine black and white frame, add bar and text on left, save, scale to 1800 pixels vertical for posting.