I admit that I don’t know what species this is. If anyone does, feel free to throw the info into the comments, otherwise I’ll get around to looking it up sooner or later.

This is one of the very first pictures I took the day I got my 60mm Macro. This spider was standing vertical, as pictured, on a round post just outside my back door. I’ve seen similar spiders that stand like this on a single stem of tall grass, but with all of their legs together.

With a macro shot this close up, it can be hard to get enough depth of field to get focus across the whole subject. The only reason this shot worked so well is that the whole spider is parallel to the plane of focus. Planning for this is one of the biggest keys of good macro photography.

I took the shot hand-held, but braced against the beam. If I were to do it again, I would likely boost the ISO to 400 in order to give myself room to boost the depth of field a couple more notches.

• Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
• Lens: EF-S60mm f/2.8 Macro USM
• Shutter Speed: 1/250
• ISO: 100
• Aperture: 5.6

Post Processing: Just a bit of sharpen and contrast; cropped it to remove excess foreground and background.