Spiders: Up Close and Personal

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Spiders: Up Close and Personal

: A composite image of a wolf spider at 1:1 magnification.; Jorge Fardels/Solent News/Rex Features/Associated Press

Jorge Fardels‘s photographs may look like puppets or computer-generated imagery, but they are actually images of real, living spiders.

Mr. Fardel uses macro photography to make extreme close-up portraits of spiders indigenous to his hometown of La Coruña, Spain. “As a child I always liked to watch ants,” he said. “I spent hours watching insects in my garden, always thinking what it would be like to be that tiny and immerse myself in that macro world.” In 2009, when he got his first camera and macro lens, Mr. Fardel was finally able to “unleash all that passion [he] had as a child.”

Macro lenses are camera lenses capable of photographing subjects at 1:1 magnification, or life-size, where the size of the subject is the same as the image of the subject projected onto the camera’s sensor. Mr. Fardels goes even further to achieve magnifications of up to 12:1 by using microscope lenses.

To capture hairs on a spider’s cephalothorax or the reflection in one’s eyes at such close range, Mr. Fardel had to expand his depth of field beyond what the camera and lens could produce. He used a technique of stacking images to achieve this. He took the in-focus points from a number of images to make one fully focused composite image.

Beyond technical skills, Mr. Fardels says that patience and passion are key in capturing these images. “The spiders are restless, so you have to be quiet and accept it may take a long time,” he told the Associated Press.