Flower Crab Spider
July 26, 2020
I found a Flower Crab Spider in our garden. They are generally rather easygoing and not too difficult to photograph. I used the Sony 90mm 2.8 and had to use a large aperture (f3.5) to get 1/400 sec which is necessary when shooting without a tripod in windy conditions and in natural light. Both your camera and the plant on which the spider move, so speed is essential. Depth of field becomes extremely narrow in these cases - I want to keep my ISO as low as possible - so I engaged burst mode and tried a lot of shots. As I wanted the eyes in focus, I turned off autofocus and focus by moving the camera back and forth - bursting right before the eyes come in focus to just behind the eyes. Every gust of wind moved the spider a few mm, so 95% of my shots where out of focus, many even by a smidge. Even the first picture is not 100% accurately focused, but it kind of works. I sharpened the face a little bit to let it stand out more. An advantage to the shallow depth-of-field is that fore-and background turn into a blur and the face of the spider becomes the center of attention. I chose a centered composition because of how the spider was positioned on the plant, with its face in the middle. I toned the pictures with some more green resp. red to let unify the composition.