Male Marpissa muscosa, Heesch, Netherlands

A 40 shot stack at 5:1 magnification of a subject about 6-8mm in size.

Disclaimer: I sacrificed this individual. I prefer not to, it's not my style, but when I do, I will always mention it. My current approach is to use arthropods already found dead, and only exceptionally take a live one. And in that case, preferably only once per species.

The part I personally like about this photo is the background ambience. Most extreme macro photos have a clinical all-black background. It's not difficult to create a lighter or colored background during capturing, the problem is in post processing. The background tends to have a lot of artifacts and may also reveal staging tricks you don't want in the scene. Brushing those away in a non-black background is very difficult and time consuming, hence most just hide everything using all-black.