Macro in Gunpowder

"I need to photograph some water," said Tom's text message. I was pretty wiped from the hike up to Weverton Cliffs earlier that day, but when a friend needs to photograph some water, who am I to refuse? Eventually we agreed on Gunpowder Falls State Park at 9am the next day.

I still wanted to keep it simple though. I decided to focus on getting some macro shots with the 5D, 50/1.8, and EF25 II while Tom did water shots. By the time we were done though, I didn't think I'd come away with as many good shots as I'd hoped; at least not as many as I got at Patapsco last year. I was wrong.



The real stars of the shoot were some very cooperative spiders though. I'm still amazed at the detail of these shots. It seems like a crime to only post the shots at web resolution though, so I've included a couple extra shots at (nearly) full resolution. I never knew a daddy longlegs had eyes like that. And is that the male hanging out underneath? Crazy.





Here's another spider that was just hanging out in the middle of his web near the ground. Just to give you a sense of scale, his legs spanned about the size of a dime. I didn't even notice the "large" hairs on his legs until I pulled the image up at full resolution.





I also came away with a few interesting leaf structure shots. Mother Nature is clearly a graphic designer.





I used the same techniques as I did in Patapsco last time, so check out that article for more info. By the way, the gear I used can be had for about $1000. Happy shooting.