Cretan Images

[David]

Hi All - I'm recently returned from the island of Crete in the Mediterranean. Here are a couple of the local residents of the ancient site of Phalasarna on the extreme west of the island.




This first fellow is collecting pollen from wild thyme. Local honey is a big thing in Crete and the countryside is covered with hives. The image is taken with my Canon 40D fitted with a Sigma 70-300mm APO lens set in macro mode. I took about a dozen shots in total with this and one other giving reasonable focus and DoF. The RAW image was treated with Canon's proprietary DPP software to convert to a TIFF file with sharpening and some colour enhancement, and then tweaked in PSP9, particularly with a High Pass filter.



This second inhabitant makes a meal of anything that enters its parlour. I spent nigh on a hour trying to get usable images as there was a breeze that blew the web in and out of focus. Only three of the dozen or so shots were sufficiently detailed and in focus to work with, but none had all of the spider in focus and all in the frame at the same time. Workup was as with the bee shot.

As usual, comments and criticisms are welcome.

Cheers

David

[Jim B.]

Two great shots.Love the spider's markings.

Regards,
Jim

[Dave Humphries]

Hi David,

#1 has better focus than I ever achieve, the only thing that IMHO detracts slightly is that the creature is a fairly similar clour to the background to the right and both foreground and background on left are brighter than the subject, so it all sort of 'merges in'.

#2 is just a shade tightly cropped (or more likely zoomed), lovely lot of detail though. I know the wind on the web problem and my lack of patience is why you won't see many spidy pics from me!

Both are decent shots and I appreciate the 1000px width of them.

I hope that's helpful,