Hidden visitor

Lacking any photo today at all when I got home from work, I opted for the mist function on my hose again and a dandelion.

I sprayed the expired dandelion with the mist for awhile. Once it was covered, then I got my camera ready. I have a 100mm macro lens, which goes down to f/2.8. I always use manual mode when shooting these, since I get better results that way. I use AV mode a lot too, but it tends to overexpose or be unpredictable at times (user error I'm sure). I tend to go between f/2.8 all the way up to f/5.0 (the lower the number, the better bokeh orbs you get). Depends on my mood and how much I want in focus. Then I set the speed fast enough to get the proper exposure. I set my focus to full and change over to manual focus on the lens. Then I just zoom the puppy down all the way to 1:1 ratio. I hold up the dandelion towards the clear, bright sky. And then move the camera in and out to get different drops in focus and then click, click, click away. I take a lot of photos, since it's almost always windy here, and my eyes suck now and can't tell if what's in the viewfinder is even worthy.

When I upload the photos, I open them in Adobe Camera Raw (oh yeah, I shoot them all in RAW). Then I just start playing with the white balance adjustments to get a pretty color. Because the dandelion is fairly pale like the sky, I can change the white balance to just about any color without it looking strange. Then I fiddle with vibrance, contrast and clarity. Save as a .jpg and that's it.

So while I was shooting the dandelion today, I realized this little visitor was hanging from it by a wispy web. He was carrying a ball of water in his front legs, which you can sort of see here and climbed back up to the dandelion quite quickly. In order to have him not be purple too, I did work with two images. One was with an original white balance and the other the purple. In Photoshop, I layered the purple image over the original and then used a soft eraser at 20% to erase the purple layer spider hoping to make him more natural.

Now it's off to relax with the boys.

P.S. View in large to see his many eyes and hairy legs. :)