Today, Alice pointed out that there was a nicely posing garden spider outside the back door. There wasn’t much light left, so I had to act quickly.

The spider was in a less than ideal position as it was in front of a white background which had dead plants in front of it, which the web was attached to, and prevented me from placing a coloured card behind the subject.

In the end, I chose a manual exposure to underexpose the background and attached a snoot to the flashgun. The snoot gives a tight beam of light with a sharply defined edge, and by aiming the flash downwards, I was able to light the spider and web, but throw the background into deep shadow.

I’m quite pleased with the result of my efforts, and all achieved in just over 5 minutes :o)