Spider on flower

Heading out the door early morning last week, spotted a long legged spider on a blooming red flower of rather exotic looking plant. Found it an intriguing sight but pressed for time, couldn’t go back in to grab my Canon DSLR.

When the following morning that spider appeared again on the same plant, knew I couldn’t let that second chance slip by and got my camera gear.

Snapped several photos of this long legged spider as it sat on the flower and subsequently scurried off after having been the impromptu model for some macro photography.

Used the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 macro USM lens but didn’t screw on a polarizing or other filter as the whole scene took place in the shade, hidden from the bright rays of the rising sun.

Having read the Canon 100mm macro delivers the sharpest results around f/11 to f/13, set the f-stop to f/11 which also increased the depth of field. However, at ISO 200 in the shade, this led to long exposure times.

While this wasn’t an issue for stability as the camera rested solid on a tripod, it did mean any movement by the spider would cause motion blur.

Once the spider was on the move, increased the ISO to 400, then to 800 and opened up to f/6.3 which enabled me to get shutter speeds of 1/40 and 1/50. Still have motion blur in the spider’s legs as it moved.

You can always see more of my photos here or on Flickr. Have also started to upload photos in Jpeg instead of Png format on Flickr, so you can see the Exif data.