Wasn't going to enter this one but I found a Black Widow spider in my yard ... I FOUND A BLACK WIDOW SPIDER IN MY YARD =:-o
That's what I get for turning over rocks. And instead of killing her, I ran back inside to get the 105mm lens and extension tubes to get a better shot. I have lost my mind entirely.
Had said extension tubes on (36mm + 20mm) and used diffused fill flash for these shots. Still too close for comfort.
3 images of the same spider combined, because I could. And I wanted a more dynamic image, like she was heading in this direction.
PP - cropped, increased saturation on red and desaturated everything else, tonemapped main spider and background (pregamma 0.697, mantiuk method, contrast mapping 0.1, saturation factor 1.029, detail factor 1), pasted in two more images of Herself with varying transparency, erased around edges of inserts, merged, increased contrast and darkened midtones, dodged eyes on spiders and burnt a little on legs of main spider, lightened highlights, vignette, resized, sharpened with noise reduction, added border. And another spider.
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Place: 33 out of 45 Avg (all users): 5.3083 Avg (commenters): 6.3333 Avg (participants): 5.1304 Avg (non-participants): 5.3505 Views since voting: 827 Views during voting: 320 Votes: 120 Comments: 6 Favorites: 0
Great texture - the grittiness adds to the feel of the composition. Love the B&W treatment for it really allow the spiders to visually pop off the page. The red of the hourglass on the abdomen and the thin red border also stands out - nice splash of color. The border is a little odd and I don't think it complements the image- most visually appealing wide screen treatments are long and rectagular in nature but here the main composition is closer to squarish in dimensions. It doesn't give it that wide open feel instead it makes it feel confined/blunted/caged. Nice addition of the spider crawling at the bottom of the border - a little hard to see because of the black on black. I think it would be more 'visible' if you had put it on the border on the top right corner crawling to the left. It would be more readily noticed. Speaking from my days back in advertising the human eye tends to fall/look at things from right to left (that is why magazine advertisers always go for the right hand page when buying spots)
I really liked this photograph, my only tiny critique is I don't love the border, but just personal prefrence. You are still getting a great score from me!
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