The other day, I discovered this little bugger hanging out on my window. He had managed to weave his web into the hole in the background, so whenever I opened the window (though it destroyed his web) he could safely retreat inside the hole.
I tried a whole bunch of things before I realized the easiest way to get him would be with a flash.I grabbed my decrepit Tamron 70-300mm, flipped the focus mode to macro and got as close as I could to him at 300mm. I tried a few flash angles, but the one that worked best was nearly head-on, with the flash sitting on my windowsill :
You can see how tiny the spider really is in this shot... almost nothing to him.
I got a lot of crappy, soft images at first. It took me about 20 minutes to realize i had to stop way down (F/22+) to get anything in any kind of focus. In contrast, I started a F/5.6. I'm sure I learned somewhere, at some point, that I stopping way down is a macro-must... but because i hardly shoot macro, I got to re-learn it.
Overall i'm fairly pleased with the shot. It's a fairly heavy crop of the original, but my lens is nowhere near 1:1, even in macro-focusing-mode so I didn't have much of a choice.
