Another yellow Crab Spider

jaharris1001 · Post by **jaharris1001** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 2:26 pm

actually,, its the same fella that I photographed the day before, he was on the same flower. I recently aquired the Novoflex flash bracket, after being advised by Ken, I was giving it a go this weekend. So far, I really like it, its a well constructed piece, it gets the flash off the camera and closer to the subject at a better angle. I also added a Lumiquest Softbox on the end,, just gettin it dialed in. Thoughts ?
Thanks
Jim

MacroLuv · Post by **MacroLuv** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 10:58 am

It looks very good in my opinion.

Nice spiky details on spider's legs.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 11:35 am

Lighting looks good -- just enough soft shadows under the legs to give separation, and no intense glare spots from the flash.

The whole thing looks a little soft to me, though, and I'm not sure why that is. EXIF data in the image says Canon XTi with 105 mm at f/11, which should be around the lens's sweet spot. Does this image look sharp at the pixel level in the original image? Maybe some sharpness got lost in the resizing? I generally find that doing a bit of sharpening after resize is needed to restore the subjective appearance of sharpness. When I say "a bit", I mean something like Photoshop's unsharp mask, 35% at 0.7 pixels width.

You're the best person to judge, though, since you were there at the subject and you have the original image to work with. I'm just musing, nobody needs to listen.

--Rik

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 4:12 pm

Okay, lets pick on Jim

The leading edges of the two foremost petals seem to be a little hot, could have been to close for the flash, maybe back down the power a little and I agree that it does look a little soft but other than that still a good image there Jim. By the way a tripod, maybe a bean bag or something else to steady the camera with something this small might be a good idea. Just the vibrations from pressing down on the shutter button can make something, especially this small, look soft.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 4:32 pm

Nah, I think I'll jump to Jim's defense this time!

The white petals look just perfect to me, both visually on screen and when I fire up Photoshop's histogram to tell me about the actual RGB values. Even in the brightest areas of the petals, there's less than 20 pixels that hit 255 in even a single component.

The bright yellows, on the other hand, now those might be blown a bit. In the bright yellow stuff, there are several thousand pixels that are 253 or above in the red channel, and over 1000 at 255. A purist could argue that those are almost certainly blown. I'm not a purist, though, and I would argue that there's not a human alive who could actually tell the difference between slightly blown and not quite blown yellows that are this intense.

So I'm gonna go with "perfect" on exposure.

--Rik

jaharris1001 · Post by **jaharris1001** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 4:45 pm

Thanks for the comments guys

now that you mention it rj, it does look just a tad soft which I didnt notice before, I guess it was possible to lose a bit in resizing

and as far as exposure, this was my first day out with the off camera Novoflex, somewhat of an experimentation day, still trying to dial in the right amount of flash while using a diffuser and off camera mount. A continuous learning curve

Thanks again,,rj, thats pretty cool that you could recall that info or histogram and look at those statistics,, thanks again guys

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 4:57 pm

Must be my monitor, NVIDIA stuff, I hate it.

Anyway the yellows look fine to me

jaharris1001 · Post by **jaharris1001** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 5:03 am

Ken Ramos wrote:Must be my monitor, NVIDIA stuff, I hate it. Anyway the yellows look fine to me

Thanks Ken

Harold Gough · Post by **Harold Gough** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 5:48 am

The eveness of lighting intensity on the spider and the flower suggest overhead lighting, as confirmed by the shadows. Thus, there is little or no fall-off from front to back of the subject. In my opinion, this is ideal lighting for many subjects.

Only the black background betrays that it is not a exposure in diffuse sunlight.

Harold