Harvestman Study
Here in the Pacific Northwest, the harvestman is one of the coolest and easiest critters to find. At the ponds by my office, they are very common and I see one almost every time I photograph there. I have a number of pictures of them, but I decided to play around a bit more this time to see if I could be a bit more original.
My goal with this shot was to emphasize the legs coming right out at you – as if they harvestman were about to grab you. I created several versions of this shot, but this one I like the best – with the body of the harvestman just visible behind.
For those not familiar with our friend the harvestman, they are not spiders. They are arachnids, but are in the order Opiliones while spiders are in the order Araneae. Of course, for the squeamish that isn’t very important. Most people know the harvestman by the common name “daddy long legs".
In this shot, I tried to emphasize more the geometry of the harvestman. I spent some time trying to get the legs at the correct angle to form a triangle with the two upper corners. This is the closest I got. This particular shot is also a focus stack of two images. The image wasn’t taken as a panorama – but was cropped to remove some distracting elements from the picture.
This shot is a bit closer to my everyday shots of harvestmen. I wasn’t too crazy initially with the lighting of this shot as it is one case where I would have preferred to use a tripod and a long exposure to get rid of the black background caused by the flash. However in this case I warmed up to the lighting as I like the emphasis on the right foot. There’s actually a very small drop at the end of it that I think is rather cool.
In the future I plan to continue to experiment with harvestmen – coming up with even more original shots. I hope this will become a common experiment with critters that I have already photographed quite a bit – such as spiders and pill bugs.
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Tags: closeup, harvestman, macro, photography, study
Lovely photos! The PacNW is not the only place with harvestmen. (..harvistmans?) Don’t go to Georgia, (or maybe do..) the harvestmen down there are in the horrifying habit of clumping together in massive wads on the sides of houses.