Spooky Spider

[Ian Cassell]

This was a tiny jumper on the backside of a flower in my garden that was backlit. I was intrigued by the huge shadow. I was only able to get one before he hopped away.
Canon 7D
Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro
1/250sec f/9 ISO 500
Canon 430 EX

Crop, sharpening, and conversion in CS5

[Steve Maxson]

A very cool shadow capture, Ian. I have to say that I'm not a big B&W fan, but others may like it a lot. I think the image would be stronger if you could blur some of the busy background elements - thereby placing more emphasis on the spider. :)

[Ken Childs]

Ian, I like the shadow a lot but there's too much else going on around it. If you can keep the quality, a tighter crop, maybe with a vignette might look good.

[Ian Cassell]

Thanks, folks. I have it in color, but it was not particularly interesting to me and I liked the creepy B/W look. I also couldn't get rid of that darn green on top of the purple flower. I'll try a tighter crop and see how it goes.

[Ken Childs]

Ian, this is what I was thinking of. Working with the full-sized original you should be able to get a decent image, even with the large crop.

[Ian Cassell]

Ken, thanks! I like that a lot. I'll go back to the original and play a bit.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Ian,
I agreed with the above comments on the BG.....so nice job by Ken showing you a possible direction to try! I do think you lost a bit of the shadow in the conversion on one of the legs.....so just keep that in mind when re-working the image.