VERY IMAGE HEAVY – A spider and a dead bee on a white flower

GardenersHelper

GardenersHelper

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Nick
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These images, which I have only just processed, were captured in mid May last year during the course of an exceptionally busy photographic day. (I captured over 2000 images – all single captures btw, no bursts - images of invertebrates and flowers in the garden, the most I can recall capturing in any one day). These spider images were captured in three mini sessions of 10 – 15 minutes each, at around 9am, 2pm and 6:30pm.

The first image was captured during the third mini session using natural light with the Canon 70D and 55-250 STM lens, possibly using the Canon 500D close-up lens, but possibly just with the bare lens. This is shown out of order to provide some context for the other imges.

Apart from that, this post has images from the first mini session. The following post has images from the second mini session. The 3rd and 4th posts have images from the final (and most rewarding) session.

Apart from the first image, all the images were captured using my FZ200, probably with the Raynox 150 close-up lens. All used flash. I don't know which flash rig I used, but it was probably a single flash unit, mounted on the camera, with some version or other of my pie tin diffuser.

After selection in Lightroom the images were batch processed in DXO Optics Pro 10 and then individually processed in Lightroom.

There are 1300 pixel high versions of these images over at Flickr

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Here is the context. There was a dead bee in the flower. This image may let you work out where the spider was for the other images.

1

0819 027 2015_05_10 IMG_1898_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


First mini session, around 9am

I noticed this spider and tracked it as it wandered around the flower. I knew the bee was there (it had been in the way, spoiling some shots of the flower), but the spider didn't seem to be interested in it. Perhaps it didn't know it was there. Perhaps it was being cautious, scouting out the territory before attacking. Perhaps it wanted live prey not dead prey. I have no idea.

2

0819 032 2015_05_10 P1680511_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

3

0819 034 2015_05_10 P1680506_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

4

0819 035 2015_05_10 P1680522_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
5

0819 036 2015_05_10 P1680524_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

6

0819 037 2015_05_10 P1680525_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

7

0819 040 2015_05_10 P1680527_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

8 I must have been getting bored by the lack of action at this point. I captured a photo of the bee and moved on to other subjects. I had no idea the other little insect was there.

0819 042 2015_05_10 P1680553_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


Continued in next post ....
 
Second mini session, around 2pm.

9 I found the spider coming down into the flower.

0819 243 2015_05_10 P1690841_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

10 It is moving towards the bee. Hurrah! Lucky timing.

0819 244 2015_05_10 P1690843_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

11 Hold on, its gone up, not on down. :(

0819 245 2015_05_10 P1690848_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

12 Ah, OK, it's going to go down from above. Good.

0819 246 2015_05_10 P1690854_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

13 What the … It's gone over to the other side, on the right. Waiting for prey? What's the matter with it. Is it blind?

0819 256 2015_05_10 P1690901_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

14 Four minutes later it's disappearing behind the petal back over on the left.

0819 259 2015_05_10 P1690922_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

15 Three minutes later it's back again.

0819 262 2015_05_10 P1690944_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

16 Eight seconds later, off it goes again.

0819 263 2015_05_10 P1690945_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

Once again I got tired of this game. So I went off to other things.


Continued in next post .....
 
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Third mini session, around 6:30pm

17 Yes!!! At last, it's made its way to the bee.

0819 275 2015_05_10 P1700076_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

18 Oh no, hold on, where's it going now?

0819 276 2015_05_10 P1700079_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

19 Is it coming to investigate me perhaps, to see what I'm up to?

0819 277 2015_05_10 P1700081_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

20 Climbing towards me, to frighten me off perhaps?

0819 278 2015_05_10 P1700085_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

21 Now back down again, on the petal in front of the bee. Not performing for me? Waiting for proper prey?

0819 280 2015_05_10 P1700092_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

22

0819 281 2015_05_10 P1700091_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

23 Ah ha. Back towards the bee.

0819 283 2015_05_10 P1700096_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

24

0819 282 2015_05_10 P1700094_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

Continued in next post ….
 
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25 Contact! It's got a line stretched out to the bee.

0819 284 2015_05_10 P1700097_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

26 In fact, it looks like it may have had a half-hearted attempt at wrapping the bee.

0819 285 2015_05_10 P1700099_DxO LR-3 by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

27

0819 286 2015_05_10 P1700103_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

28 It's obviously interested enough to clamber around a bit.

0819 287 2015_05_10 P1700109_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

29

0819 295 2015_05_10 P1700157_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

30

0819 297 2015_05_10 P1700168_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

31

0819 300 2015_05_10 P1700192_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

32 And this is where the FZ200 sequence ended. I suspect that this was when I switched to the 70D to see how it could handle the subject (the cameras' clocks weren't synchronised unfortunately).

0819 302 2015_05_10 P1700224_DxO LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
 
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Nick, i`ll not comment on any one shot as they are all fantastic, you have got the light, focus and detail spot one (as usual) and these are all great.
Over 2000 shots in one day, wow and I thought my 500 in a day was crazy lol How many were usable?
 
Great stuff Nick especially getting so many shots this good.
 
Paul Iddon said:
What a fantastic spider collection. #10 - I love the "expression".

Paul.
Click to expand...

Thanks Paul.

Graham said:
Nick, i`ll not comment on any one shot as they are all fantastic, you have got the light, focus and detail spot one (as usual) and these are all great.
Over 2000 shots in one day, wow and I thought my 500 in a day was crazy lol How many were usable?
Click to expand...

Thanks Graham.

I put 325 into this album at Flickr. That is something like 15% of the day's captures, which is a high proportion for me. In many cases there are a number of captures of a subject, for example series in increasing magnifications, sometimes with quite small steps in the magnification. There are some images of the same subject from different directions, for example putting them against different backgrounds. And in some cases, for example a bee moving around a flower as it is feeding or a fly grooming, there are a number of shots of the same subject and framing but with the subject in different positions or postures.As a result of all this the Flickr album is probably too repetitious for most people's taste, which would reduce the number of usable images, perhaps by quite a lot.

On the other hand I threw out a lot of images of similar image quality to those in the Flickr set because even I thought they were too similar to include. For example, I very often take a number of shots of a subject with a particular framing so as to try and get one that works out ok, but of course if things go well with that scene I might end up with several or more that are usable in terms of image quality but look pretty much identical, and all but one of them get thrown away. So in terms of usable image quality, there were more than I put into the Flickr album, quite a lot more in this case - things seem to have been flowing nicely all day. It often isn't like that, with very meagre pickings, and then I tend to put just about everything that I think I can get away with into the Flickr album, sometimes including one or two, or more, that I have severe doubts about. I've learnt to be a bit more tolerant about such images though, because occasionally, despite my misgivings, I post one of them here and it turns out to be someone's favourite. We all look for, and look at, different things in images I think.

I'll post some more from that album here in the coming day or three.

ChrisA said:
Vary nice sequence - you certainly chased the crab about. Good to get it on the bee at the end.

2000 - wow that is some going, especially with no burst. I hate to think how long the editing process took.
Click to expand...

Thanks Chris. It was exceptional. 400 - 800 would be a more typical number of captures in a day, either in the garden or out at one of the nature reserves.

I worked on the processing on and off for several days. The first stage involved trawling through the images and making a very rapid "Reject? Yes or No" decision. Sometimes I have to do something to images just so I can see enough to decide. So for example an image may need to be made brighter, or have its highlights brought down. If this is the first of a series of similarly exposed images I copy the adjustments to the rest of the series. Then, If there is something obviously wrong, like DOF falling out of acceptable bounds, or part of the subject being chopped off, an image gets rejected (usually). But if it isn't immediately obvious I don't agonise over it - I leave it in. In this case I ended up with just over 1,000 for the second run through. (I usually reject a greater proportion than that in this first run through.)

The second stage involved going through the not (yet) rejected images and doing a combination of processing, comparison and selection until I could decide which ones to (probably) use. This included trying to get the colours and brightness etc similar for each of the images of a particular subject/scene, At that point the chosen ones would have been cropped and adjusted almost to their final state. There might still be some repetition at that stage, especially if I captured a subject in a mini session and then came back to it later in the day. The chosen ones from the different mini sessions might overlap, but that gets dealt with later. At the end of that stage I had about 340 chosen shots.

I then copied the raw files for the chosen shots to a new subdirectory and did DXO Optics Pro batch processing on them (same processing settings for each image). The batch took 3 hours or so to process. I then copied the processed files (now in DNG format) back to the main directory for the images. Then for each pair of raw/DNG images, I copied the Lightroom processing settings from the raw file to the DNG file. This doesn't always work quite right, so for example in a small number of cases I had to move and resize the crop. Very annoying. For the 340 or so files this took an hour or so.

Next I exported 1300 pixel high versions to another directory and looked at them full size in XnView. I use this because it handles colour management properly and so I'm looking at it (on a hardware calibrated screen) as it will be seen by anyone else who looks at it full size on a calibrated screen. After looking at a few of them I realised I had used the wrong settings for the DXO batch processing. So I had to redo that, and redo the pairwise copying of settings. Then I went back to looking through them in XnView. For any that needed further tweaking I went back to Lightroom, made the adjustments to the DNG file and re-exported to JPEG. During the process a few more of the images got rejected.

When I got to the point of being able to look through all the images and not feel the urge to adjust any of them I moved over to the (not colour managed) FastStone Image viewer. I use this for the final "bureaucratic" stages.

I used Faststone to reorder the images for each scene/subject so they seemed to me to flow ok from image to image if you looked at them in order. (This can conflict with time order, so for a definitely time-based series like the spider, which has to stay pretty much in time order to make sense, there is quite likely to be some jarring jumps in subject size etc from image to image when viewed in order.) At this stage a few more images were rejected because they were too similar to another one when placed in the final viewing order.

Now I went to my spreadsheet and allocated the next number in sequence for the set of images and gave the set a title. I used Faststone to batch rename the JPEG files, and made a new directory in the folder arrangement I use to store processed images, the new directory being named with the sequence number and set title. Into that I moved the JPEG files and the raw files they were derived from. Then I copied that folder onto a separate (and normally disconnected) backup hard drive, uploaded the JPEGs to Flickr and marked the working folders (both the master and backup drive versions) as having been processed and uploaded. That way I know when I do a periodic clearout that I can delete the folder without thinking about it.

On and off. Several days. :)

alfbranch said:
Great stuff Nick especially getting so many shots this good.
Click to expand...

Thanks Alf.

LumixNoob said:
Brilliantly done. A really interesting sequence of shots.
Click to expand...

Thanks.
 
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