Dew catcher

Dew catcher, originally uploaded by ZERO CEM.

This photo takes me back to the good old times... when I got to fly to Florida for free and I could use the free time I could find to go out and take some pictures at the beach. Those days might be gone, but I still have a lot of unprocessed photos to take me back there.

This particular picture, was taken on Sanibel Island. I planed to go to shoot a sunrise from there, but unfortunately, the weather had some other plans. There was a very dense fog that morning, which prevented me from actually taking the shot of the sun rising in the horizon, but since I was already there I wandered about and noticed some strings of web with some dew droplets in them, so I switched to my macro lens and I started shooting.

I have two words to describe the experience of shooting a spiderweb, on a windy, foggy, morning at the beach while handholding your camera with a macro lens... NOT EASY...

I had to manually focus each shot, because the autofocus wouldn't lock on the droplets and I had to be chasing the image because the air kept moving the web all over the place.

I had to increase the ISO speed to 1000, because I needed to take the shots fast (before the wind moved it too much), there was low light, I was using a very narrow aperture because of the macro and I had to work from a distance because the web itself was behind a "restricted area" so I couldn't get closer to it.

I must have shot around 100 pics and I believe this is one of the few shots that could be salvaged from that day, but still, it was a fun experience with some very rewarding results (if I do say so myself).

Had I been more prepared, I might have read this article from digital photography school FIRSTand maybe I could have walked out with a better shot: How to Photograph a Spider’s Web