That first is utterly exquisite, and beautifully lit. I'd be tempted to edit out the bit of stem below the petal because it's the only thing preventing this from being perfect.
Nice shots -- good depth of field considering the magnification. One slight thing in both shots -- they look underexposed by a stop or two in both cases, probably because the metering in the camera has picked up on the wide expanse of white (from the petals in the first shot and from the background in the second shot) a bit much. I don't know if you 'do' the Zone System, but it looks to me like the spid wants to be about a zone V, but it looks more like a III, so it's lost some detail. Similarly, the petals on the flower look like a VI, but they probably want to be a VIII (lightest zone that still shows some detail). The middle bit of the flower feels like it wants to shine a bit more, so it wants to be a VI or something, but it looks like a IV. So, at a guess, they are probably about 2 stops underexposed. Otherwise, nice framing in both cases, and I like the way you've managed to get sharp focus on the spid's eyes. You could probably fix both in photoshop easily enough -- if you also push the saturation a bit on the flower, not too much though, I think it would be outstanding. Nice work!
Exposed up by a couple of stops in software it comes out like this (http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/photos/misc/IMG_0067ps.jpg).
I'm still on a learning curve particularly with flash (I've read NK Guy's article on EOS flash (http://photonotes.org/articles/eos-flash/) a couple of times but don't have anything like an intuitive grasp of it all yet). If the camera didn't get it right so often I'd have more tricky cases to practice on l-)
I've heard of the zone system, but I've yet to come across a better than cursory description of how to use it.
I used to use the zone system (or at least a cut-down version of it I learned from some photo magazine or other) back when I did B&W film and did my own printing (early to mid 1980s). I recently rediscovered it, so I've been trying to fit it with digital -- it does seem to work pretty well.
*The* reference is the book, The Negative, by Ansel Adams, but you might also like to treat yourself to The Camera and The Print too, because the three make a series. All are superb. All don't even mention digital, of course, so it is interesting to see how the film techniques Adams perfected were just *so* much harder to get right than the tools we have available now.
The corrected image does look a bit livelier -- it might still need a bit more tweaking, of course, but it does bring out the surface detail of the spider pretty well.
By the way, doseybat remarked that she really liked the flower!
I doubt you'll regret it. All three talk about the zone system. The Camera also has a really good section on view cameras, which sold me on the idea to the extent that I'm intending to get hold of one.
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Exposed up by a couple of stops in software it comes out like this (http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/photos/misc/IMG_0067ps.jpg).
I'm still on a learning curve particularly with flash (I've read NK Guy's article on EOS flash (http://photonotes.org/articles/eos-flash/) a couple of times but don't have anything like an intuitive grasp of it all yet). If the camera didn't get it right so often I'd have more tricky cases to practice on l-)
I've heard of the zone system, but I've yet to come across a better than cursory description of how to use it.
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*The* reference is the book, The Negative, by Ansel Adams, but you might also like to treat yourself to The Camera and The Print too, because the three make a series. All are superb. All don't even mention digital, of course, so it is interesting to see how the film techniques Adams perfected were just *so* much harder to get right than the tools we have available now.
The corrected image does look a bit livelier -- it might still need a bit more tweaking, of course, but it does bring out the surface detail of the spider pretty well.
By the way,
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