Do It Again!

My goal was fairly simple, I thought: apply the Rule of Thirds to portray a summer flower in full bloom. It was a cloudy, rainy week in August. Each morning at about sunrise, I went to a local park to photograph one of a a group of flowers. Day after day, the weather refused to cooperate. But it was a great opportunity to practice in the diffused light of the overcast mornings.

I spotted the scene depicted in the photo below: a tiny spider weaving a dew-drenched web on a nascent cluster of flowers. The photo was taken with the lens at its closest focal point, which for that lens was 1.5 ft. The spider was hard at work over several days, and I took a lot of photos. I rejected most of them because of unwanted stuff in the background. When going for a shallow depth of field, it's easy to forget about the background sometimes.

This uncropped 5184x3456 pixel photo definitely does not follow the Rule of Thirds, but I like it. The focus could have been sharper, however, and using a camera with a better sensor might have helped. I will be revisiting this scene in the future.

Copyright © 2013 Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.

Philip Wheeler Photography

f/5.6, 1/20 sec., ISO 500, 18mm

Order a Limited Edition Print of this Photograph

Trey Ratcliff's Landscape Tutorial (use code SIC-6683 for 10% off!)