I originally got a macro (close up) lens mainly to do jewellery/product shots, I didn’t really intend to do much nature photography with it. A while ago whilst doing some late night internet shopping I had a moth buzzing round the lightshade being a nuisance. I turned the light off hoping it would go away but it just landed on the computer monitor instead. I tried (and failed) to get a shot of it using the monitor as a lightsource (it was too dim). I then decided to have a go with the flash not really knowing what to expect. Considering it was all done with no preparation I was pretty pleased with the result. Here’s the set up if you don’t believe me!

The chance to do some more nature macro photography fell into my lap recently - though I warn you if you are at all afraid of spiders then I strongly suggest you don’t click through to the second part of this post!

About a week ago I brought my reclining garden chair into the living room to rescue it from a thunderstorm. The next day I noticed something moving between the arm of the chair and headrest which on closer inspection turned out to be a nest of recently hatched spiderlings. Again I immediately went to grab my camera to take some photos.

Lighting-wise I used an Elinchrom monolight with large silver reflector as shown, mainly because I’d just been using it for something else so it was already set up. A lot of light makes things easier but as before you can get away with a small speedlight due to the possibility of moving it in close.

The back of the chair is providing the background, showing up white as it’s directly in front of the strobe on full power. As well as not showing the dirt on my sensor as badly I decided shooting from another angle to give a darker background would suit the subject - I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m a fan of spiders but I was originally attracted by the bright yellow bodies and black markings. Following an internet search I later determined they were completely harmless - the offspring of Araneus Diadematus or common garden spider).

The spiderlings were barely a few millimetres in size. The definition of macro is the ability to focus on an object around 36mm in width at a distance at which it fills the frame, so these creatures really fall into the supermacro category however the kit required for that is pretty specialist and things start to get really difficult as depth of field and light gathering becomes a real problem.

As it is I was able to shoot at f/11 this was just about enough to get several spiders in focus if they were roughly in the same plane. I had started at f/32 but was getting considerably softness due to diffraction. Focussing was then a case of setting the lens to the closest distance and moving the camera.

I still wasn’t really liking the results, so I had the idea to shoot along the web, producing the above. Despite getting fewer individual spiders in shot the expense of getting fewer individual spiders in focus, I liked the abstract nature of the shot (click for larger).

I haven’t talked much about lighting. When you’re less than a centimetre tall a bare flashhead appears the size of a movie set scrim hence pretty much any lightsource would be considered soft. Direction, then plays the most important part and in this case it was easier to leave the light were it was and shoot from another position. This final image is probably the best of the set - there’s a little foreground detail for context and the light is more dramatic (click for larger). I’m still feeling my way through this stuff, I certainly wouldn’t consider myself any sort of expert but if I get any more opportunities for some macro nature photography I’ll let you know how I get on!

MG

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Behind the Scenes, Lighting, Tutorials and guides. 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.