Thursday 14th April 2011

This is more like it! This was a gift of a photo, everything set up just as it was. A daddy long legs curled round a tooth mirror (shame it wasn't on the reflective side!) on the bathroom windowsill, drenched in natural light. I flipped my lens round (with f/11 to ensure enough light for me to see the shot, even if it meant a very shallow depth of field) a took a test photo at 18mm - the creature was magnified so much I only captured its head, and the view was a little dark. Realising I could zoom out, I did so to 250mm (everything works in reverse with the lens reversed) which meant I could get further away, and also that meant the flash worked. With the flash popped up the live view works better, so even better if you don't have to flip it back down again to take the photo. I tried to zoom in on the live view screen to nail the focus better but the subject was wobbling around in the display, so I fetched a tripod and just managed to plant it on the edge of the sink, and then could zoom in to 10x. With mirror lock up and a 2 second timer which finished counting down just as the display stopped oscillating with the movement of my finger press, I got a nice crisp shot. I thought the daddy long legs might be dead as it didn't stir when I moved the tootbrush holder further and further back so I could get more of the creature in (this is actually one of the closer shots, as the further back ones lost the blue background of the toothbrush tube), and I felt a little like I was cheating and a little gruesome. However when I rotated the mirror inside the pot to get the blue background back it had enough and scarpered off up the window. But I had a shot that I liked!

250mm (I think), 1/6s, f/11, ISO 400