Close encounters with an insectivore!

Tyler, Fantastic photos. You have the focus down, AND the subjects, haha, however if you will accept any suggestions, you could put some more thought into controlling the backgrounds. try some vibrant colours that contrast with your subjects. It would be easy to buy some coloured card stock, and pin it fairly far behind the subjects.

Some day, I'll actually fess up and blow the money on the Nikkor 105mm and Kenkos I need/want... but until then, here are some "not truly macros, but macro enough for my budget" shots... I used some inventive work with some magnifying lens to grab these.

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Howdy Tyler,

Great shots! I'm real curious... What was the f-stop on those shots? You may already be "all over" the subject of f-stops but if you haven't tried it yet, I'm curious if cranking the stop to 16 or higher to increase the depth of field would get a little bit more of the tail in focus without loosing image quality elsewhere. Since you have a nice stand to stablize the equipment, it may be ok to end-up with a long exposure time to compensate for the high f-stop. I'm just a hack when it comes to knowing how to use the features of my old Digital Rebel. One of these days I'll sit down and get serious about it. I should since my brother owns and runs one of the finest photo finishing businesses (digital and film) in the country if not the world :eek:. Anybody need a 50" x 120" photographic print :D?
 
Howdy,

I just remembered a couple of shots of a garden spider that I took back in September. The "belly-shot" was at an f-stop of 9 and a shutter speed of 1/160 sec. while the topside shot was at an f-stop of 25 and a shutter speed of 1/4 sec. Neither was a particularly sharp photo. But you can see that the larger f-stop setting did give a little more depth of field on the topside legs portion in that image. I think that both of these shots were taken with little or no lens zoom cranked into the cheap 18-55mm Rebel kit lens. I just used software zoom.

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Dave, roger the f-stop stuff. I am unsure what these were shot at off the top of my head. The second photo is in much need of a larger focal range, however in all of my experimentation this one was interesting to me because of the composure. It kind of looks like a snake wrapping around itself and biting the branch...or I'm just crazy!.. yeah, most likely crazy. Your spider shots are outstanding.
 
Dave/Tyler:

The Fstop for your first photo (Claw and water drops) was F3.5 (at 1/320 shutter).
For the second, (tail and claw) it was F3.5 aswell, but shot at 1/400 a stop higher in speed.

Tyler, I like where your going in the second batch of photos. The colour worked well witht he sujects. As for using a larger focal field in the second, I dont think you should have done that, but rather have rotated to the left side of the subject about 45 degrees to have the waterdrop and tail tip in focus.
 
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