Kind of a "tutorial" for how I do some of the things I do.

I shoot in RAW. One reason is that I can recover from bad photos and come out with something presentable.

So yesterday's spider I made a stupid mistake. To try and put it on a uniform background, I attempted to shoot it on a piece of paper. Even though I shoot manual, this causes some odd lighting issues. I also shoot with a stopped down aperture to maximize depth of field. This reduces overall light.

Put those together and I get weird exposure with a dark spider on a bright background. In retrospect, a more neutral background would have been more appropriate.

So what to do now? The top image is the jpeg that the camera would have given me by default. Can't do much with that. Increasing levels would not reveal a lot of good.

So, go to RAW. RAW will keep a lot of visual data even from those dark patches and I can increase the levels to bring them out. That gives us the middle image. This was done in Adobe CS6 Camera RAW.

Unfortunately, the middle picture looks like I took it on a cell phone. Lots and lots of noise, even for ISO 100. (also in retrospect, I may have had a better exposed shot at 200 or 400, but this is what we have). But, we can fix this!

Camera RAW in CS6 has some pretty great noise reduction. So, while still in the RAW phase, apply noise reduction and we have something that is kind of decent now.

Probably are a few things I could do better, but this is my current skill level. As always, taking a better shot is always preferred, but sometimes with certain subjects you don't get that luxury. This spider only stayed still for about 10 seconds, spending the rest of the time just running non-stop.

So, with wildlife, you don't always get the time to take as many shots as you'd want. So you have to make do with what you get sometimes. And sometimes you can make them passable.

So, hopefully this was informative!