Sulfurs dancing

A late session today, as I arose at 4am to photograph the spider in my mini garden. The reason for this unearthly hour, was to obtain tripod shots with no wind hindrance. Unfortunately, there still prevailed a very light breeze, enough to spoil my plans, so back to bed I went. Wind in the dead of night is very unusual.

I woke again around 10am and headed off to the common. As expected, the wind had picked up and was making the photography very tedious. I had to abandon a few shoots as I was getting sea sick following the subject back and forth. Is there a photographic term, 'macro panning', well there is now.

I did pick up some good shots, a green Sabina dragon found a solid stick to perch on and allowed me to get up close for forty shots, some quite good but nothing that dazzled me. A nice silhouette of a hairy caterpillar against the sky, but a bit boring. An interesting angle on a large grass hopper front end came close to blip, as did some pansy male shots, but I decided to go with the porn shot.

I screwed up the sulfur shot by miscalculating the required exposure compensation with the back light. In normal background of greenery, I find that sulfurs require 2/3rd stop under exposure, but the bright background light was going to force an under exposure anyway, so I went with zero adjustments. I should have taken more time and worked it out properly, as the shot needed at least a stop of over exposure, but I managed to rescue something in post.

I did some more practice shots of the St Andrews spider too. This is proving to be a difficult subject to gauge, with it's vibrant yellow patterns always over exposing and washing out, so today, I used a one stop under and it was much better. It could stand more, but Then the other details start to get lost.

The question was asked, if I actually feed the spiders for the blips, actually I don't, it is not necessary. Normally to see a spider actually capturing it's prey is quite a rarity, but the insect population is so dense here that I don't have to wait long, plus I have four St Andrews spiders around the mimosa bush to look for action. In fact, while I was spending five minutes doing my test shots, three hoppers were caught in the web. The spider cut two of them out, releasing them, a bit like a fisherman throwing the small ones back and the spider wrapped the third for a snack later on.

Dave