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Posting another couple of photos for all the spider lovers out there...
The first one is a St Andrew's Cross spider (the apostrophe is for macka!). He only got half-way through making the cross in his web, and had to stop for lunch...

The second is another golden orb weaver.


I had trouble getting a sharp shot of the 1st one, so any advice would be appreciated.

I can offer you a little advice that I use personally when dealing with spiders, and that is manual focus. I've found the D70 often struggles with getting focused with these little guys, so I often switch to manual focus. I'm not expert at spiders or any sorts of bugs, so I'm sure others will have helpful suggestions.

Most probably the shutter speed was too slow for the focal length due to the apparent bad light. Possible up the ISO, or use a tripod to avoid camera shake.

HTH

One key suggestion is to try to avoid such a contrasty background. Also I'd suggest that your metering needs to be focussed on the subject rather than the whole scene in this case. Hard to provide much further input without knowing a liitle more about the lens used etc.

oh yes... and 1/60 shutter speed at 200mm focal length is a likely culprit too...

Michael.

Thanks all.
Craig, I was using manual focus, but I still seemed to have missed it!
Mj, the lens is a tamron 18-200, and I was using it as close as I could get so on the edge of the focus. I was using the camera in aperture priority.

Will have another go. He's still sitting in my front garden.

Try using the flash, either the on camera flash or (even better) the SB600 or SB800. The more light the better
with spiders - the devil is in the detail. And yes to the tripod too, very helpful.

They are great fun to photograph however. I have taken quite a few spider shots and you definitely get
better at it as you go.