Some jumping spiders, focus stacked

Images taken in a controlled environment or with a posed subject. All subject types.

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MarkSturtevant
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Some jumping spiders, focus stacked

Post by MarkSturtevant »

I have been very much enjoying my Venus/Laowa 2.5-5X lens. These pictures are from manually stacked images of two local jumping spiders, photographed on the dining room table. After stacking in ZS, the Tiff images were sharpened in Topaz Sharpen AI and processed further in Gimp.

Synemosyna formica, the tiny ant-mimicking jumper that is pretty common around here. To enhance their ant-like look, they move around like ants, and even wave their front legs to look like antennae. To get this one to not run off too far, it was put on a leaf that was floated in a shallow dish of water. That is an old trick.
ImageAnt mimicking jumping spider by Marcoli Sturtevantione, on Flickr

Phidippus audax, the bold jumping spider.
ImageBold jumping spider by Marcoli Sturtevantione, on Flickr

This one was pretty easy to work with (some aren't). One can see that it had regenerated one of its front legs.
ImageBoldJumperStack by Marcoli Sturtevantione, on Flickr

Here is a crop of the previous picture. There were many artifacts from the stacked pictures, and Topaz introduces its own artifacts (although wow, it does add a lot of good details too). So these bold jumping spider pictures in particular needed a lot of clean-up with many of the tricks I know in Gimp. This included round after round of layer masks, cloning and healing brushes, and even the smear brush was used to "paint" back in numerous hairs that could not be rescued. Hours and hours, and these are pictures that I consider will never be entirely done.
ImageBold jumping spider cropped by Marcoli Sturtevantione, on Flickr

Thanks for looking!
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters

Marcepstein
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Re: Some jumping spiders, focus stacked

Post by Marcepstein »

Pretty amazing images :!:

Guppy
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Re: Some jumping spiders, focus stacked

Post by Guppy »

Hi Mark
Very beautiful pictures well retouched
Kurt

lothman
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Re: Some jumping spiders, focus stacked

Post by lothman »

MarkSturtevant wrote:
Sat Jan 14, 2023 2:00 pm
To get this one to not run off too far, it was put on a leaf that was floated in a shallow dish of water. That is an old trick.
done very well =D>

did you add some ice cubes in the water or allow these spiders a cooperation with a bracketing photographer by holding still for a while?

dy5
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Re: Some jumping spiders, focus stacked

Post by dy5 »

Mark - Very nice photos and quite an accomplishment. A clever strategy with the floating leaf and also the ice cubes idea.

Would it be worthwhile to start a thread over in the Techniques forum about strategies for stacking with live subjects? Doing a search, I didn't see much information on the topic, at least not in the last several years.

MarkSturtevant
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Re: Some jumping spiders, focus stacked

Post by MarkSturtevant »

lothman wrote:
Sun Jan 15, 2023 4:24 am
MarkSturtevant wrote:
Sat Jan 14, 2023 2:00 pm
To get this one to not run off too far, it was put on a leaf that was floated in a shallow dish of water. That is an old trick.
did you add some ice cubes in the water or allow these spiders a cooperation with a bracketing photographer by holding still for a while?
I did not use ice. As I recall, the leaf was in a shallow dish of water, and I used a piece of clay and a pin to hold the leaf in one spot. The use of water this way is a trick I learned from others, and it works well with active spiders that don't want to move over water. Some spiders will run over water, by the way (wolf spiders, for example).
Here, the spider would scamper from edge to edge but I could keep it in the field of view of the camera for longer periods. When it paused for a moment, then I attempted to take a bunch of pictures. Over a hundred pictures, I believe, with a couple series that allowed a few frames to be stacked.
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters

MarkSturtevant
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Re: Some jumping spiders, focus stacked

Post by MarkSturtevant »

dy5 wrote:
Sun Jan 15, 2023 6:38 am
Would it be worthwhile to start a thread over in the Techniques forum about strategies for stacking with live subjects? Doing a search, I didn't see much information on the topic, at least not in the last several years.
I will put up a brief post in the Techniques section. My method for manual stacking in a "studio" setting (which is my dining room table) is rather laughable, really, and seriously needs a better method since it introduces artifacts. But others might give good tips.
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters

Bob-O-Rama
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Re: Some jumping spiders, focus stacked

Post by Bob-O-Rama »

Those are just awesome. I guess I get easily frustrated, but pretty much any time I try to take a picture of anything that it alive it usually tries to sting me in the eye, or waits till everything is dialed in to jump or fly away.

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