Photography, Macrophotography, arachnids, precision editing.
Spiders in the Dewy Backlit Dawn
If, like my son, you are triggered by spiders, I suggest stopping right here.
For some reason, I have several drafts on diverse subjects in various stages of non-completion that I’ve been picking at desultorily. Still, the piece you are reading has pushed itself to the front since it is about pure photography, about taking off with a best bud to hunt spiders at daybreak in the mist, with no air movement, perfect temperature (mid-sixties), just some of the bestest pitcher-takin’ weather and light I have ever seen. A morning like we had is a rare and beautiful thing.
My friend Oscar suggested it was past high time we went a’spider huntin’. Neither of us would actually harm a spider (“the spider is your friend”) unless it was attacking, which, in my experience, is vanishingly rare since, in the first place, we are several times their size. Like rattlesnakes, they are uninterested in wasting venom on anything they can’t eat. We don’t bother them, and they don’t bother us. Easy, peaceful feelin’. (But those of us living in Australia may have a different take…just sayin’.)
So anyway, strolling in with Bob (Walker, my fire-engine red anthropomorphized 4WD off-road rollator*), the building looming out of the fog radiated a nostalgic early-twentieth-century vibe, but the pristine, too-smooth concrete footpath just didn’t jibe.
*(He exaggerateth.)
So I fixed it.
Full disclosure: the bucolic scene above is not entirely TrVth. The murk is, and the building, leafage, and sneezy weeds all are, but while I liked the leading curve of the path, the path itself just didn’t do it for me, it being all smooth and concretey-like. It was jarring; it seemed not to belong, like the spaceship that landed in the garden yesterday.
“This,” I sez to myself I sez, “should be an unpaved dirt track. The concretey-like ambiance is all wrong. It doesn’t suit the rest of the essence. In short, it rooons th’ pitcher!”
Like many of you (probably), I am a photographer because I can neither draw nor paint, but sometimes, the elements in a photograph frustratingly resist coming together. Were I a painter, I could paint the rugged path I see in my mind’s eye, but I ain’t. Sometimes, I think we photographers work at a disadvantage; the painter paints the scene as they wish it was. The barn may be there but should be over there, and that tree needs either to move or disappear, and damn, there’s a glaringly anachronistic concrete path ruining the scene! That’ll never do!
Painters got it made. (Oh yeah? Step over here and say that.)
You’ve heard me yammering in several recent stories about how utterly beyond enamored — gobsmacked I am of the brand-spankin’-new-outta-the-box Adobe Generated Fill (Beta) that I instantly knew this was a job for…
(Was that an actual sentence expressing a clear idea?)
So anyways, there y’go, one century-old dirt track coming right up courtesy of Al the Adobe Beta Algorithm. I think the illusion is near perfect. As Rodrigo S-C always asks, “Ya want fries with that?”
(No, I can’t be serious! Why would I be serious? I just survived a flippin’ heart attack, f’cryin’ out loud; I reject serious.)
By now, you’ve noticed I am stalling, giving the arachnophobes plenty of time to cover their eyes and back away slowly.
But now, the moment of TrVth! Ya ready?
Hang on. That’s not a spider.
Oscar has terrific eyesight and is Überobservant, catching things I would never otherwise see, like this dragonfly on the wrong side of the stick waiting for its sopping wings to dry. I think it’s a unique picture, seeing only the wings and not the whole animal. One might even say “creative.” Yeah. A guy who insists he is no such thing may just have accidentally created a creative creation. And thanks, Oscar, ‘cuz I’d never have noticed it.
Okay! So here we finally go!
What made this outing was the dew. Everything was saturated. Every web was sagging catenaries loaded with moisture. The complete lack of wind allowed every drop to stay in place. These conditions could not be replicated in any way except naturally. Oscar and I were lucky, and grateful.
As the sun began to dispel the mists, we perceived two types of spiders here: Orb weavers and Tangle spiders. The tanglers’ sloppy, messy gouts of dense silk are usually bound around a cluster of stalks and branches. They ain’t pretty, but I guess they work or they wouldn’t make them.
The elegant orb weavers live cheek-by-jowl with their bedraggled neighbors. With an unmistakable air of upper-crust superiority, in the quiet hours, the orb weavers softly discuss their untidy neighbors over chamomile tea in tiny bone-china cups. If they had pinkies, they’d stick them out.
“Tangle spiders are just not in our class, y’know. They just don’t care. I saw one with torn jeans just yesterday! (Collective orb-weaver gasp!)
(It is also generally known that the backward-ball-cap-wearing tangled web denizens, indeed, do not care, so there’s that: pppbbbbbblllltt!)
Moving on!
It is a little tough for the tangled-web-we-weave crowd to compete with an edifice on this scale. This was the best shot I got. Everything fell into place. Oscar was lining up the angle, so I elbowed him aside and stole it (sorry, Oscar, pppbbbbbblllltt!). Not the barest breeze disturbed the web to displace the mathematically positioned rows of minute droplets hanging precariously from the catenaries (these little guys are Mother’s structural engineers). The sun was just tearing aside the wisps of fog, and the one fly in the ointment (so to speak) was that the spider herself, being thicker than everything else, was a stop too dark.
No worries. Adobe delivers new, more acute tools daily. The latest masking tools available in both Lightroom and Photoshop are scalpel-precise, making it possible to make the most surgically accurate selection of Ms. Golden, right down to her spindly legs, to raise her value by one stop. She is translucent. She glows!
📸As always, gratitude for looking in. I sincerely appreciate it! Questions in the comments will be answered promptly.😊👍
A (too many) word(s) about tools and techniques (more yada yada you can skip).
I am very fond of Bob Walker.
This is Bob (Walker). Well, two Bobs. Bob One has smaller wheels suited to pavement but not uneven ground. Bob Too, in the foreground, has oversized wheels, an articulated frame to keep all four wheels on the rough ground, and gas shock absorbers. I like to say Bob (Walker) Too has four-wheel drive and double-compound low gear, but of course, I jest. Still, Bob Two can easily go places that would hinder Bob One. Ask me how I know.
I love my lightweight kit, but for the serious stuff, I use this pair: on the left is my Sony FE 70–300mm f/4.5–5.6 G (105–450 equivalent) — massing 30 ounces — an absolute beast but a fantastically versatile lens); and at right, my Sony E PZ 18–105mm f/4.0 G OSS (27–158mm equivalent) — 15 ounces. That’s three pounds of lenses on two pounds of bodies.
What makes them worth it, especially the monster 70–300, is its macro setting on the barrel.
It can do stuff like this.
I own a top-tier flat-field Sigma 70mm f/2.8 Art DG Macro for Sony FE —15 ounces, equiv. 105mm. It is so sharp you could cut yourself…
…but it’s a prime.
I love zooms for their versatility and flexibility. I am told again and again that zooms are inferior. Less ferior? Whatever. I simply cannot see it, so why should I kill myself hauling dozens of “superior” primes? (Okay, yes, the mass of the huge zooms is, er, pretty massive, but much of the time, I only need one.)
As for settings, I could look them up in the metadata, but they are useless except for these specific pictures. If you had been out with us on this extraordinary morning, you could have made photos similar to these, but all else would have had to be exactly the same. I could tell you how to set your camera and what would be the point? What are the odds that you could make the exact same pictures?
It is not about cameras, or lenses, or settings; it is about learning to see, and capture, light. Here endeth the lesson.
(The spider is your friend.)
