Spiderweb in the Golden Hour
Yesterday I posted the spiderweb in the image to the right to Flickr. This particular photo is, perhaps, my favorite (self-made) spiderweb shot to date. I said that at the time, now I’ll give a bit of an explanation.
Typically I tend to *not* like spiderweb photos: they’re all the same. Particularly the ones that I take – I see something & try to bring out that detail. But I never quite… catch the beauty of what I see.
A week or so before going on this vacation, however, I re-read the first couple of chapters from Photography and the Art of Seeing
. The author (Freeman Patterson) devotes one of the first chapters to “thinking sideways,” and specifically uses the example of a spiderweb:
Webs are so beautiful in their own right that they had kept me from examining them carefully, and especially from photographing them in a personal way…
…When you think sideways you will find new ways to see your subject matter, and you will stumble upon discoveries and happy accidents. Abandon your normal premises , and go on a search for new ones.
This was in my mind when I first saw the spiderweb. But it was just a web at mid-day. Nothing special, kinda dingy. Later that afternoon, the light began to yellow, and the dinginess turned golden. At this point I noticed it again, pulled out my camera, and started to circle the web. Looking up, down, climbing on a chair, squatting under it. On a monopod, off the monopod, against the light, with the light…
… at some point, I found that there was an entire side that brought out the gold in the light. It wasn’t the typical angle I’d normally look for, but I found the view more pleasing. I kept working up & down, within the same basic area of light (and quickly, the light fades fast), playing with different depths of field. I was finding the background to be better than the web.
The end result is what you see; the focus on this one wasn’t the spiderweb itself. Rather, it was creating an abstract in the background, and then using the spiderweb to break up that pattern.
