Creepy Crawlies

[Julie Kenward]

The weather is just starting to turn here and the first signs of fall are making an appearance. I ran into this black and yellow Argiope (garden spider) along the edge of the woods yesterday and had one heck of a time getting a clean image as the web had him facing into the foliage instead of out towards me. After much maneuvering and some prickly burrs in my backside I finally got a clean shot at him.

In pp, I used the paint brush method to even out all the BG as best I could as there were several blotches of different colored foliage in the image. I then added a texture that had a vignette around the edges - this texture helped to further mask my removal of most of the BG. I added a filter/render/lighting effects omni spotlight right at the center point of the spider and used a final curves adjustment to darken down the surrounding area and deepen the vignette even more.

(Thanks to Ken Childs for the spider I.D.!)

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Julie, Good to see you back and posting here again. I am sad to report that I am coining a new acronym here: DNWFM.... (Does not work for me.) The view of the spider is strange. Is its head hidden? The bright parts of the leg look burned but there is very little clipping there so a Linear Burn would help. My main problem is that the spider itself looks fuzzy as if the texture was applied to it. Hope that other folks like it more; I rarely like any textured images.

[Paul Lagasi]

This garden spider is just waiting around for good vibrations........ditto on the burnt out leg, but I like the idea and composition, with a few tweeks needed, I might clone out the OOF front leg in background that looks like a shadow, but that just me....I recently got an image of Banded Garden Spider, they are really big spiders, it wasn't as afraid (not really the right word) of me, as I was of it.

[Julie Kenward]

I see what you're both saying and I'll take another run at it. Thanks so much for the insight.

Artie, originally the image was a vertical with the spider in the downfacing position. There was no way to capture the face or do a front-on view as it backed into a huge thicket of sticky bush so I stood off to the side and shot towards it, pressing my body as close as I could to the bush (ouch!).

[denise ippolito]

Jules, I like the center placement for this one. The noticeable vignette creates kind of a spot light effect which I like. The color of the texture is lovely. I do think I would tone down the bright web and leg area a bit that I think Artie is referring to. I might sharpen the back leg just a bit or remove the texture from it. I'm not much into spiders but you made this one appealing!

[Arthur Morris]

Artie, originally the image was a vertical with the spider in the downfacing position. There was no way to capture the face or do a front-on view as it backed into a huge thicket of sticky bush so I stood off to the side and shot towards it, pressing my body as close as I could to the bush (ouch!).

I know that in nature photography the subjects don't always do what we want them to do; all that we can do here is evaluate the image

[John Storjohann]

Hi Jules;

Good to see you posting again! I love the texture you applied to the background...and the spotlight effect created by the strong vignette is, as Denise mentioned, very effective. I'm going to take this in a different direction....the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this was that the spider would be cool as a near silhouette, with just hints of the yellow and orange showing through, and then the edges sharpened a bit...but then again, that's just me thinking out loud (sometimes effective, sometimes not ). I think Denise makes a good point about toning the web down a bit. I hope to see more from you soon!

[Andrew McLachlan]

Hi Julie, one of my favorite spiders to find. I look forward to the repost after you rework the image based on the previous comments. I find spiders a challenge to photograph. They are hardly ever in the right position and usually there is lots of clutter around them.

[Julie Kenward]

Denise & John, thanks for that thought as well...I'll keep playing with it!