The Spider in the Dandelion

Another macro shot with my 25mm f1.7 lens. When I started taking that shot my main goal was to see how much of the Dandelion I could get into focus and I was so intent on that I missed the spider at first.

As usual with these macros I knew I would have t do some heavy cropping to eliminate a lot of dead space around the dandelion. So I wanted to make sure that the image was as sharp as possible and there was very little if any noise. Moving my f-stop to with an I SO of 250 and a shutter speed of 1/320 second eliminated the risk of any motion blur while keeping noise low and giving me a reasonable depth of field. In fact given the strength of the sun I could probably have reduced ISO further and increased my f-stop a little higher.

It was only at that point after fiddling with my settings that I looked at the image again through the viewfinder and noticed the spider. I adjusted my position a little to make sure that it too was in focus because I think it adds something a little different to the image.

I knew before taking this shot that it was probably going to be in black and white. I was taking photos outside, in the middle of the afternoon on a bright and sunny day. That lighting creates really harsh and contrasty shadows which, for the most part, don’t look good in color. So the first thing I did on importing this into Lightroom was to convert it to Adobe monochrome. Then I cropped in as tight as I could get away with and dropped the Clarity Slider while pumping up the Contrast. After that I applied three radial filters for more local adjustments.

• Darken the background, decrease the Clarity further to make it as smooth as possible
• Lighten the Dandelion itself and bump up the texture so the individual seeds stand out
• Just a tiny amount of darkening on the spider so it is clearly visible separate from the Dandelion.

I’m really pleased with how this one turned out.