Garden Spider Study

Update:Amie’s kind comment combined with the bright sunshine of today inspired me to head out and take another series of shots of Ms. Garden Spider in the high sun such that I could also have a green background.

And, as Amie (an old friend, btw, with a neat weblog who also happens to be a founder of the very cool EBSQ Art collective) suggested, the green background is really quite pleasant.

Ms. Spider grabbed a meal overnight, as can be seen.

All in all, I think I like this shot the best, now, from the whole “Spider Focused Photograph” perspective. I still dig the metallic photos just because the thought of a spider running around with a carapace made half of molten metal strikes me as pretty cool, too.

Original post: Roger and I are hanging at my parent’s pad for a while and that means lots of nature, bug hunting, temporary pet management, and — of course — photography.

Roger found a beatiful garden spider sitting in the middle of its web in an easily accessible spot. After reading strobist for a bit, I decided to take a handful of photos from different angles with different lighting. (No strobes, though).

The differences are striking.

This particular photo was taken at sunset with the sun behind and to the left of me. I was slightly below the spider and, thus, caught a bit of the reflected sunlight in the silvery parts of the spider.

Click on through for 3 more shots of Ms. Spider with different lighting.

Same lighting as the first shot, but taken from overhead such that the rays of the sun were not reflected off the silvery parts so much.

Much warmer colors as a result. Background is green due to the grasses behind and below the spider. The rest of the shots have the sky as a background (mostly).

This was shot when the sky was realitvely overcast. Fairly dark, even. As such, this entirely illuminated by what is effectively ambient light.

The spider looks particularly metallic in this photo. I also like the line of hairs around the body. Reminds me of taking a RenderMan class from the folks at Pixar where they talked through the making of a Tropicana Juice commercial that, among other things, had a dancing kiwi. They only rendered hair on the edge of the kiwi — the rest was just a texture map.

Looking at this again, it reminds me a bit of drops of solder.

This photo was with the same ambient light as the last, but shot from below. The golden stripes on the spider are quite striking, but I really like the legs (with hairs) in this shot.

However, I like this shot the least of the four taken. I only posted it because I like the actual angle and potential of this shot a lot, but mechanics of the picture taking environment stymied any efforts to get a proper exposure.

It was relatively windy and a fairly dark day, thus even a tripod really wouldn’t have helped.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Nature, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.