On spiders and photos

Spider on ice, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

This is another spider photo from Tuesday. When browsing the newest photos, I started to think what is the photographic value of a photo, and what other values there might be.

This photo is frankly a bit boring, just a brown spider on ice, but for me it was a revelation in what I can do with photography.

These spiders were so small that they were hard to see with the bare eye. Also, the contrast with the snow and ice was great, so you didn't really see the brown color, only black.

I took the photo using standard exposure settings on the LX3, going as close as I could in macro mode (1 cm or so). Later I corrected the exposure a bit in LightZone, and only then the brown colors of the spider revealed themselves. Also, I used here a bit darker version of the image to get the variation in the colors of the ice to show up properly.

For me, this image was not so much about photography as about the capability of a digital camera and post-processing software to aid in seeing what is happening in nature. Spiders moving on ice in -2 °C temperature, that is interesting.