Last summer, after washing the car, I sat down on my front porch to enjoy a cold one. No sooner than I had sat down, I noticed, right next to the porch railing corner post, a couple spiders dancing around each other in a most haphazardly strung up web. For a couple minutes, I simply soaked it in. After awhile, my curiosity got the better of me: I wanted to see what it would look like through my macro lens.
This quickly turned into a challenge. What had started out as something of a waltz had turned into something a bit more passionate, that seemed to convey a sense of urgency. Keep in mind, these spiders together could have sat on the top of a No. 2 pencil's eraser. What had attracted me to the in the first place was the way their dancing in the web was disturbing the reflection off my newly washed car. So, here I am, shooting handheld at something smaller than a bouncing M&M.
I settled on an ISO of 800 with an f-stop of F/7.1 and a shutter speed of 1/250. That allowed me to shoot handheld and still stop their dance while capturing the light coming off the web. Now, I am quite sure that I could have filled up a card shooting these two, but, as quickly as I had started to shoot them, they seemed to either tire of each other, or to have accomplished whatever they had set out to do. I only managed a few captures before they parted and went their separate ways. All the same, my refreshment was still cold, and I finished it before heading in to see what I had caught.
The post processing was very straight forward. Slight adjustments for brightness/contrast and hue/saturization, and that's about it. I did look at it desaturized, but it wasn't that interesting. This may be worth spending some time doing a selective desaturization, bring back the "sparks" and the spider bodies, but I haven't had time to try that, yet.
For the moment, I can't wait for Spring, when my yard will come back to life. Until then, I'll keep digging through the archives, looking at reminders of what's ahead.
As always, comments and criticisms are welcome.
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