I have to say, this kind of photography exercise is not for the faint of heart or someone who is suffering from Arachnophobia (fear of spiders). I myself am arachnophobic and so while doing these photos, I felt cringy.
My condition was caused by an awful experience when I was younger. It was when a usual house tarantula jumped on me while I was inside the toilet. That left me the feeling of fear or eagerness to kill that specific spider to get rid of it. It is what it is. Over the years, I never tried to fix it to the extent that I can sleep knowing that there's a tarantula beside me.
Anyway, let's talk about photography.
Have you noticed that grunge effect in these photos? This is exactly how it looks like as I shoot it. I haven't added any grunge filters or textures in these images. I just happen to find these subjects behind the window panes. The glass was dusty, to begin with, and I like it since it added the extra layers of depth into the image.
The lighting is interesting as well. It was backlit and it's all-natural light. The initial result was very dim or underlit. As a remedy, I had to produce the images and save them as RAW files. In this way, I have the flexibility to dynamically control the shadows, mid-tones, & highlights with maximum extent. It's really awesome editing RAW images.
Since the images were backlit, I noticed that there is a chromatic aberration on the edges of the spiders. I kinda like it and so I kept it that way. But if want, I could easily reduce the chromatic aberration effect in photoshop.
I kept them to add extra effect to the photo. It fits well with the cinematic look that I wanted to achieve for these images.
