Still death

As opposed to 'still life'. Odd title - well, none of it is still alive and one of it has a bad reputation.

The dead spider is a false widow - not as bad as its real counterpart but they can still give you a nasty bite. It is sitting in front of a long dead collection of vertebrae from some small mammal that I found under a hedge.



It was photographed with an 'A' series 28mm lens that had been reversed onto a K1. The image is a stack of four, processed through Combine ZP, not so much for depth of field - (f22 did quite a good job there) - but to improve the lighting. The end of the lens was about 2inches away from the spider. It was focused by moving the sheet of paper on which the arrangement rested while the camera remained static on a tripod. Live view and mirror-up remote release did the rest. These were 8 second exposures.

And here is a very much alive one that I rescued from the bath a while ago. I simply grab house spiders but not these perishers!



All comments, favourable or otherwise are welcome!

Fascinating. Not only the images, (superb), but the explanation. Thank you.

An interesting way of getting these two nice shots.

Looks like you're enjoying yourself here, good shots and interesting the way achieved. Wonder how they match up compared to using your macro 50mm? They look sharp on my mobile.

The first is as described while the second is indeed with a simple macro lens. The second one is all in one focal plane (looking straight down on it) but there is considerable depth to the first one together with a horrendous natural lighting problem necessitating complete shading from the left side and blocking any light entering between the vertebrae from behind. I don't use flash as I simply can't understand it! My solution is to light the bits you want and then combine them. Additional depth can be added as needed by further stacking but f22 was enough here.