After seeing a popcorn spider in Tyler’s back yard during the day, we decided that it would be sweet to wait until it climbed out to the middle of it’s web to take some macro shots of it.
Photographer info:
I’ve found the best way to do this is to setup the shot in a few ways:
- Put the camera on a tripod
- Zoom the lens out as far as it can go and then move the camera and tripod as close as possible to your lens’ minimum focusing distance.
- Set the camera focusing on manual and focus as sharp as possible on the subject. For me, I have a “Live View” mode that allows me to zoom in on a certain spot of the picture and see it on the screen in the back….it allows me to focus very precisely.
- Set the camera settings to what you need to in order to get a good exposure of the subject. If it’s bright out, be sure to set to a low ISO to get a picture with the least amount of grain. If it’s dark out, make sure your shutter speed isn’t too slow to freeze any movement that his happening (if it is to slow, increase your ISO and/or aperture to compensate).
- Set the camera to take the picture 2 seconds after you push the button; this eliminates camera shake from you pushing on the camera shutter button.
Also, for what we were doing for these spider shots, I had to manually adjust the aperture to work with the flash that Tyler was holding. We had it on a low power (maybe 1/16th power) and he was moving it around to different angles as I was taking shots. Some angles gave a lot more definition on the spider than others while other angles highlighted the web very well.
Anyways, here are a bunch of cool shots that we got.