New Stock Approvals

I had 10 new images approved today at Shutterstock, taken during my current trip to Bangalore. To view them all, please visit my gallery here.

First Download from iStockPhoto

Had my first download from iStock today, the image below of the black widow.

My house seems to be crawling with them, just going outside tonight I saw 5 full grown black widows and 7 baby black widows... Being slightly arachnophobic, in hindsight I wonder if it was such a good idea to go exploring...

There have been a couple of Orb-Weaver spiders around the house as well, I don't know if it is just the summer heat that is bringing them out or why I haven't noticed them before, the I am seeing a lot more spiders around my house than in previous years, maybe I am just paying closer attention.

This guy was pretty tough to capture as the wind was blowing him around quite a bit. Overall he is about 1.5-2 cm long, including legs, and the wind was moving him around 6-8 inches. Suffice to say, a much larger distance than the depth of field, and the wind has not seemed to die down at all when I am trying to take a picture!

While the spider images are starting to sell, I am hoping that they start to pick up around Halloween.

Freeway Traffic

I've been meaning to get around to taking these photos for a while now, so Saturday night I finally got around to taking them. They were kind of successful, but I want to go back and revisit them, hopefully a little earlier by maybe 15-30 minutes. However, these two just got approved at ShutterStock and Fotolia, so I guess they were somewhat successful, I guess I'll find out if anyone downloads them!!

One of the issues that I have with the images is that the sky is getting too dark. I wanted a little more of the Dusk look, which is what I was looking at, but it didn't come across in the image. Noise was a big issue that I had to deal with, I am shooting on a Canon 30D, and even at ISO 100 and trying the long exposure noise reduction, the sky was terrible!! I ended up duplicating the layer in photoshop, using the median filter to remove all noise, and then with masking just the sky, lay it back over the original at about 70% opacity so it brought back a little texture. I'm hoping that if I catch it a little earlier, there will be enough light in the sky to get some nice rich color, but not too early so that the lights aren't visible.

The moon was rising during the shot as well, but with needing the wide angle, it didn't fit well with the photo so I removed it.