Tag Archives: Spider

Spider on My Car Means Macro Time

I was waiting for a friend to arrive at SEA and was parked up in Burien.  I noticed a couple of small jumping spiders on the car and, since I had the macro lens in the trunk, decided to try and get a few shots of them.  The problem with spiders and mirrorless cameras is that the focusing logic hasn’t been trained to deal with their multiple eyes.  The body tends to be what the camera focuses on.  Still, I was able to get a few reasonable shots as they scurried across my car.

A Little Spider Gets Macro Treatment

While getting ready one morning, I saw a little spider in my bathroom.  It was wandering around on the vanity unit and would stop for periods of time without moving.  I figured I might want to give the macro lens a go and went to get the camera.  The introduction of the camera was not ideal for encouraging it not to move but I got a bunch of shots.  Unfortunately, they were at a pretty high ISO.  However, stacking shots can help with the ISO so the result was okay.

A while later, it was back.  This time it had climbed up a cable and this reduced the number of ways it could go.  This time I decided to tool up and got a clamp to hold the camera and set things up to shoot a proper sequence for stacking.  The shutter speeds were low with the clamp which meant ISO could be a lot better.  Here are the results of those experiments.  (Sorry to people I know that don’t like spiders but, really, this thing is tiny!)

Focus Stacking and Backyard Arachnids

I’m sure a bunch of my relatives will look away for this post.  Maybe they aren’t fans of focus stacking but it could be the spiders that put them off.  My macro lens has been out a lot during the pandemic since it provides something to photograph close at home that is a bit different.  In fact, I have got so used to having it available, when I am out with a normal lens and come across something small and interesting, I am a bit frustrated to realize I can’t get a close up shot.

The problem with the lens is that it is not a very advanced one and the autofocus on it is pretty crap.  When I am trying to hand hold the lens and something is moving and so am I, things get a little unpredictable.  We had a few spider webs in the backyard with the owners sitting in the middle.  The afternoon sun provided great illumination so I figured I should give it a go.  I tend to go to manual focus and move to get the shot but with the breeze moving the web a lot, things are pretty tricky.  This is what prompted me to try cheating.

I figured that focus stacking does a good job of increasing the area in focus and it manages to align images and make use of what is already in focus.  If I can be straight on to the spider and stay reasonably still and roughly at the right focus point, let the web move towards and away from me and fire a bunch of shots off hand held.  Ignore the ones that have nothing in focus and then let Photoshop work on the remainder.

It isn’t a perfect solution and some weird things happen at the edges of the frame but the center works out pretty well and you can crop in a little to address the edges.  I was quite pleased with the outcome to be honest.  It is making the best of a few bad elements but it did do quite well.  You don’t get to control what is in focus for each shot so getting a complete set to work with is unlikely but overall, not a bad experiment.

Domed Spider Webs

Anyone out there a specialist in spiders?  I know plenty of people who absolutely hate spiders.  They are not going to be much use to me here.  Besides, a lot of them are from the UK and I never saw anything like this when I lived there.  As we were walking around the grounds at Bloedel Reserve, we saw a lot of spiders’ webs that were a domed structure.  They didn’t look like webs that I had seen before.  They seem to have a lot of web material above them and then a dome structure to the main web itself.  I think the spider sits underneath the dome awaiting its prey.  Anyone know anything more about this and how it works?

Spider Hiding Out

My effort at shooting macro images of bees in our front yard (this post) also yielded a surprised.  While I was waiting on a flower for the bee to come to me, I noticed the flower already had a resident.  A little white spider was hanging out in there.  I am not sure what its intended prey was.  It seemed a bit small to take on a bee but I have no idea if that could happen.  Maybe it wanted something smaller.  I got a couple of shots of it that interested me.  The prime shots show its “face” in detail.  Macro shots have a very shallow depth of field so I missed with plenty of shots but one or two had the end of the legs in focus.  The detail of the hairs on the legs was so cool so I include that too even if it looks like I missed focus on the shot (which obviously I did!).

Spider Web Engineering

This spider web was attached to one of the towers at Hyakuri.  The web thread was quite a heavy gauge compared to what I normally see and I was fascinated by the way it was attached to the wood.  Multiple strands were attached in a ring forming a cone of thread that merged in to the mainline.  It was quite a feat of engineering.