tillowlglass

Strings of pearls

A foggy, cold, wet morning and the spiders were busy overnight. Luckily this one hadn't caught anything, so the web was intact, weighed down heavily by the morn...
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A foggy, cold, wet morning and the spiders were busy overnight. Luckily this one hadn't caught anything, so the web was intact, weighed down heavily by the morning dew.

The one shot, out of about ten, where the web wasn't shaking from an occasional gust of wind, threatening to dislodge the drops or making a sharp, static picture impossible in the low light.
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NIKON D3200

settings

Aperture f/11.0 ISO 250 Shutter 1/60 Focal Length 350/10

upload_date

Jun, 2015

Views

180

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+13

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Same photographer See all Behind The Lens

Scan of print from 35mm color film. This place gave me the idea for my novel "Seladienna". Dunedin, New Zealand.

Sometimes one really, really wishes one would have had a hi-res camera at the time of taking certain pictures. This is definitely one of them.

The camera info for this image is incorrect. This is a photo digitized from a medium format film negative using a Nikon D3200 on in a home-made digiti

If you scout around in my collection you'll find the source of this image. ;)

Scan of a print. Original taken with a vintage Ashai Pentax Spotmatic.

My wife, one daughter and a friend looking out over the Pacific in Lima, Peru. Nikon D3200.

One of those random shots that I never thought would come to anything. Sony Cybershot DSCP200.

I couldn't believe that everything lined up just so. Nikon D3200. 35mm.

One of those rare shots that happens when you track the subject and hold the shutter release down, hoping for the best. No blurring, and even the wate

Didn't have my super-wide angle lens, so had to do with the crummy kit-set zoom. Thought I'd give it a tilt to give it an Escheresque air.

Behind The Lens

Location

This photo was taken on the property we owned then between Woodford and Kilcoy (Queensland, Australia), about 60km north of Brisbane. Chilly autumn mornings after clear-sky nights tend to create foggy mornings and leave everything laden with dew. The spiders—every single one of the several dozen species found around our house—leave their webs; even in the grass, and you can't walk anywhere without stepping on some little short-lived marvel of arachnid art.

Time

One chilly foggy morning, Dew covered spider webs everywhere. The magic moments between first light and the sun rising high enough to burn away the fog and dew without regards to the beauty it creates. Since the sun rises fairly quickly in those latitudes, we're talking about less than 30 minutes. It's a photographic Goldilocks interval that reveals sometimes exquisite, but always poignantly transient, beauty; made all the more touching because you know that in a few short moments it'll be gone. Forever.

Lighting

The sun was shining through a gap in nearby trees, just high enough to illuminate the drops, but the background was still in shadow. Everything changed fast. Had to change positions a lot to get just the right angle for the reflections.

Equipment

This was taken with a Nikon D3200, with a 35mm AFS 1.8 Nikkor, at ISO 400, F5.6, 1/100s. Handheld. Trying to frame it in several different ways, going with the rapidly changing light—and having to wait until the occasional touch of a breeze didn't shake the web and blur the image. 1/100 was marginal for this image, as the vibrational frequency of the web was quite high.

Inspiration

There was no way I could have walked past this. The contrast between the soft web and the dew and the harsh barbed wire behind it, the whole poignancy of this terribly transient beauty—who could walk past?

Editing

Not much post-processing for this one. A few level adjustments and noise removal in Capture One. I have created a monochrome and slightly reframed version of this image, mainly because I like monochrome and I didn't think the background color added much. If anything, it distracted from the subject. Monochrome also allowed me to darken the background and so de-emphasize it. But color or no-color ultimately is a matter of taste.

In my camera bag

I have the D3200, a D610, a couple of old heavy Nikon glass zoom lenses (35-70 and 70-210) and an ASF 50/1.8 for the D610; plus the kit lenses and Tamron 11-16mm for the D3200. However, I mostly use the Tamron at f=16mm for night sky shots with the D610, because it makes for great galaxy panoramas stitched together by Photoshop. I also have an iPhone 8Plus, which in a lot of situations actually performs better than either of my 'real' cameras. It also has the advantage of being guaranteed to be in my back pocket. And since I am by and large an 'opportunity' photographer—except when I do shots with models or want to catch some serious night-sky shots—having a reasonably decent camera handy is more important that overthinking the issue of kit-ing oneself out. In my experience, 'opportunity', and especially unexpected opportunity (the kind that teaches you to 'see' things that most people would just miss), is a far richer source of amazing photos than staged stuff. Again, models and portraits excepted; but even there I go got minimal kit: the D610 with the 70-210, and an SB700 flash for light; with the 30-70 and the 50/1.8 as a backup (usually when doing night-time stuff), just in case. I dislike tripods, which are a drag for opportunists like myself. And since, except for night-sky photography, I rarely *need* a tripod, why the extra ballast? There are so many ways to support a camera. And why schlepp around a bulky D610, or even a D3200, when your iPhone8Plus produces some amazing imagery. About exposure: Photography is about capturing an *instant*; a single frame if you will, in the continuum that is the movie of life playing out around us. And I mean an 'instant', not an averaged interval of something happening, like long-time exposures of water flows.

Feedback

"Carpe instantem." 'See' the moment. Seize the moment. Don't walk away from it. This instant is unique in the entire history of the whole universe. It'll never repeat. Value it. Realize that it will pass all-too-quickly. Give it persistence, memory. Share it. I could have taken that image with an iPhone8Plus. There's no magic to it. It just takes patience, the ability to 'see' and love what you're seeing, and taking the shot. Or many shots. And *that* is the magic. If that picture had turned out crap—I mean, let's face it, I took over two dozen shots of this!—it still would have been better to have spent the time trying than just walking past and saying "Oh, that looks pretty", or something equally banal.

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tillowlglass

tillowlglass

Strings of pearls

A foggy, cold, wet morning and the spiders were busy overnight. Luckily this one hadn't caught anything, so the web was intact, weighed down heavily by the morn... Read more

Behind The Lens

See more amazing photos, follow tillowlglass

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A foggy, cold, wet morning and the spiders were busy overnight. Luckily this one hadn't caught anything, so the web was intact, weighed down heavily by the morn...
Read more

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Earn coins, get amazing rewards. Join for free.