I’m not going to lie… this week, the spider image has me rather frustrated…

I’ve been trying to get the web to be more visible, the spider’s colors more visible, and keep the image looking like a photograph…

I’m not opposed to the more graphic looking images I’ve been coming up with, but it is frustrating that I am having so much trouble keeping it looking ‘real’.

I’ll admit, though, that a lot of it as to do with the image itself.  There are things that I could have done (in theory) to make the web more visible and the spider’s colors more visible in camera.  I could have had the web backlit.  I could have reflected more fill light onto the spider to show its details.  Alas, those things were not possible from where the spider was hanging and my accessibility to it.  For, I did try to bring more light to the spider to give it more detail, by using the built-in flash as fill light.  As for the back lighting the web, well, it was between my balcony and my neighbor’s balcony and there was the roof of my apartment building between us… so I was limited in my ability to move around my subject.

I guess what I’m trying to say, and to convince myself, I did the best I could, given the situation.  And that perhaps the techniques I’m trying in post are the best I can hope for.  I feel moderately better.  Honestly, if I just accept the fact that it isn’t going to be a photographic image I might be able to let go and be more creative making it a graphical image.

I’ll go ahead and show my attempts at both, mostly because I put in the work, and you might be interested (click to enlarge).

Kind thoughts and comments are welcome!

In case you missed it… an Announcement from last week’s post…

Announcement

As many of you who have been participating in the One Four Challenge know, Robyn, our illustrious host, is needing to take a break from hosting to take some down time for herself.  She has asked me to host the One Four Challenge for the month of November, and I happily accepted! 😀

Everything will stay the same, except instead of linking to her post you will link to mine for the month of November.  I will publish my weekly post at her usual time (6:30 am Aussie time on Mondays [UTC+11 AEDT]), so that everyone can start linking as usual.  Then throughout the week I will visit everyone’s posts and leave a comment (like Robyn does now).  It will be fun and a bit challenging, but I’m totally up for it.

In December, the challenge will be passed back to Robyn and I believe we will have our Review month.

It is an incredible honor to be chosen to help Robyn out, and I hope that you will all still participate in the challenge in November.

I have a lot on my plate today, because yesterday was the last day of our vacation.  We had a stay-cation where we built furniture (Ikea), rearranged the house, and started a big de-cluttering project (which is still in progress).  So I don’t have time to write the tutorial today… I’ll try to write it a little later this week, perhaps Wednesday?

Until next time…
~nic

I have joined a month-long photo post-processing challenge called One Four Challenge, hosted by Robyn at Captivate Me. “This challenge is about processing １ image in 4 different ways over 4 weeks.” Every Monday Robyn posts a new version of her photo and challenges us to do the same each week.

* GIMP is Open Source software that is available for all platforms (Linux, Mac, and Windows), it is a photo editor that does many (if not all) of the things you can do in Photoshop. You can download it for free here. The GIMP online manual can be found here.