Here's a photo of a jumping spider. He was quite active, always looking straight at the camera as I moved around taking photos at different angles.
I quite like the surrounding complementary colours of the spider's environment which contrast with the neutral colours of the spider itself.
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| Jumping Spider Canon EOS Kiss X digital with a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM at 160mm EFL 1/400, f/4 & ISO 400 - handheld |
In this shot, I was going for an environmental portrait of a spider. So my question is, do the colours visually overwhelm the spider? Should I try to crop a little tighter to bring more focus to the spider.
Hi Steve,
ReplyDeleteI'd probably say yes, that the colours do overwhelm the spider. My eyes keep getting attracted to the flower, even when I look at the spider, he's just too small in the picture to keep my interest.
That said, I doubt whether you could crop this image tighter on the spider, because the background would be all pink.
One thing I'd like to see in this picture is a little bit more above the spider. For me, he sits a bit too high, making the protruding flower more the focus of the image. Perhaps if he was more centered, he would keep the focus better. That would probably throw off the green/pink colour balance though, but perhaps that's a good thing?
Geoff.
Hi Steve,
ReplyDeleteI agree with Geoff that over all, the spider is a bit too close to the top of the frame.
I'd consider trying a tighter crop though to see how it went.
I have a feeling that I want to see more detail in the spider too, but that would depend on how much more resolution you have to play with, and if your aparture was small enough to get more of him in focus.
Regards
Craig.
Interesting thoughts guys.
ReplyDeleteThis was slightly cropped from the original image so I could get the spider bigger in the frame. However if I crop too much I would loose the green-magenta colour pair that I quite like in this image. This gave me the idea of a black and white conversion using the red channel. With the red channel, red becomes white and the spider remains black making the spider contrast well with the background. However this isn't the effect I was going for.
I wanted this shot to be about the colourful environment of the spider and not just another detailed portrait of a spider.
There is definitely not the resolution to get more detail in the spider here. The original shot had the spider more centred in the frame and still balanced the relative weights of green and magenta. I think I like it more than this attempt to make the spider larger. When I tried to crop the image to make the spider larger and still keep colour in balance, the position of the spider moved to the rather strange location it is in now.
Since the spider is a living thing and we can see the eyes, to me, they add a huge psychological weight to the spider, so I don't find the colour so attention grabbing. I keep coming back to those big black eyes that are looking straight at me.
steve