Hardly! That’s some well-controlled depth with that lens (and perhaps just a bit o’ skill, methinks). I like the softening fore and aft with the fly. With such a short working distance, I can’t believe it held still for you.

Thankfully the little spiders aren’t too squeamish for the closeness of the reversed setup. I wonder if the lens looks like a giant spider eye to them?

I have a Sigma 105mm macro lens coming in soon, looking forward to doing some side-by-side shots with the 24mm Nikkor. Hopefully with an extremely cooperative spider.

Fair enough! You can find it here.

Taken with a reversed Nikkor 24mm f2.8 AI-S using a “milk jug” diffuser and D200 on-board flash.

Wow, very nice, certainly better than my macro work. —Jeffrey

I wish it was all in camera! My laptop doesn’t like processing files in Photoshop. It is the result of a stack of 3 or 4 photos. I set the camera to get a 2 second exposure then locked the remote release before, during, and after the afterburner resulting in about 25 photos. I picked the three or four where the burner was on and the whole aircraft was leaning forward (so I didn’t have to try to fix the alignment where it was leaning back) and stacked them using the “Lighten” blend mode. This got me all of the flashes on the other side of the jet and let the flashes from others on my side to act as a fill for the jet.

The clouds were moving pretty quickly and ended up being blurred after the stacking so I took the best sky from the stack and masked the rest out… then back into LR for the final slider adjustments and upload with your plugin

Access was the easy part! The Lightning Preservation Group is a small group of aviation enthusiasts that were lucky enough to acquire two English Electric Lightning jets when they were decommissioned in the 1990s. They keep them in running order (but not flying due to Civil Aviation Authority laws) and hold several events through the year to finance the project. They’re also rebuilding an alert shed from another decommissioned RAF base and are at the point of building up funds to put doors and sides on. They finally got the roof installed last year.

Very nice… the stacking-in-Lighten-mode trick sounds useful… I’ll have to remember that. Excellent results! —Jeffrey

Wow, as a fan of The Big Picture myself, I recognize that as high praise, indeed. Thanks! —Jeffrey

D700 + 1.7×TC + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8@ 210 mm — 1/640 sec, f/4.8, ISO 6400

You got an extra 10mm out of that lens… no fair, you already have glass we all covet!

“Thou shalt not covet your bloggers glass.”
The extra 10mm is due to the TC… I had the 70-200 at about 125mm, it seems.

Enjoying the start of fall in Kyoto from a distance. Thanks for sharing.

Me, I spent my Sunday (very similar to Saturday, except where it’s not) doing some reversed lens macro photography in Santa Rosa, CA. Finally got a decent spider shot!

Well, now, let’s see it! —Jeffrey

WOW, those are some amazing shots. The specific one you linked to…. was that all ambient? The lighting is just gorgeous. How did you get access for all those shots? —Jeffrey