Neoscona nautical - Brown Sailor Spider

This brown sailor gained access to my home, and set up residency. Rather than get upset about the situation, I decided to feed her and take some photographs.

What appears to be a rather mundane arachnid, comes to life when you get up close, and start to pay attention to the small details. Of course, with my extremely poor eyesight, this is not possible, and so I use my camera to collect the detail for me.

You may have noticed that these images contain rather a lot of detail compared to what you would normally get with a macro lens. Correct, it is just not possible to get this kind of detail in a single shot.

Once you start getting down to closest focus with a macro lens, the depth of field, the thickness of the ‘in focus’ part of the image, is less than 1mm, in fact, I calculate more like 0.25mm. So, how come the whole of this image is in sharp focus – stacking is the answer.

This is the technique were you take several images, in this case 25, and merge the ‘in focus’ parts of each individual image, and merge them into one single image. Each image the focal point is moved forward 0.5mm and Photoshop does the rest.

Entomological departments in museums, doing studies on bugs, use the same photographic methods, but they give it a more fancy name.

Location is Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. Home.