So first I tried a pineapple soaked in tuna juice so my cat would find it interesting and want to be close to it. All the shots I took stunk (along with the pineapple). So I staretd to look for the praying mantis that had been hanging out under my porch but it has been cooler lately and the season for them may be over. I have a bunch of these spiders hanging out on my house so I grabbed one and popped him in the freezer for a minute or two and set up my photo shoot. A cloudy sky poster board on a table on my back porch in the shade along with this apple from our farmers market. I placed the spider on the apple and started shooting. As he warmed up he started to not want to hang out on the apple anymore so with camera in one hand, eye in the view finder, spider inthe other hand hanging by its thread and a toddler oneither side of me pointing to the spider and apple I attempted to swing the spider onto the apple and take the picture at the appropriate time. Challenging to say the least. Took a bunch of shots and decided to edit this one as everything seemed to be in focus and the composition was not too bad. For all you animal/bug lovers - the spider left and made camp off of my gutter on the back porch.
Overall I am pleased as to how this came out. I am hoping that this does well in the challenge since the picture itself has an attractive quality to it, the colors are nice and the focus is sharp onthe spider. I have no clue what to expect in this challenge as far as other entries - a tough one to come up witha solid idea. I am hoping for a top ten shot here. We shall see.
Post process - levels, saturation, selective color, USM, NI, crop and rotate to angle the stem better, cloned out some small brown spots on apple, burned the spider and his shadow abit, border, resize for web.
Statistics
Place: 39 out of 134 Avg (all users): 5.9942 Avg (commenters): 8.2222 Avg (participants): 5.7333 Avg (non-participants): 6.1351 Views since voting: 3406 Views during voting: 308 Votes: 171 Comments: 13 Favorites: 0
Nice shot! Though I like spiders, I still wouldn't touch one! Focus is spot on (as you noted) and the spider is cute. Your score is quite decent given all the bug & blank haters on the site. I didn't vote in this one but would have given it at least an 8.
This is a bit disturbing - I'm not a huge fan of spiders - but it's also a very well done photograph. The richness and depth of the apple is quite good and the clarity of the spider is, well, disturbingly good.
This is way under rated. All of those 5's? Maybe they thought you really WOULD see a spider on an apple, but the shot was soooo good. I'd given it an 8.
Hmm.. kind of looks like the spider that I used for my Silhouettes III entry. Has the same leg patterns. Anyway, interesting shot and I like the composition and the choice of background color. I also like the way that the right edge of the apple has a bit of red... a neat little detail.
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