Weekly Photo Challenge: Creepy

Ok, so if spiders aren’t your thing, click away and come back to visit another time.

I had been working this week with sepia tones and I thought that might work well with this week’s theme of creepy.  The images I had been working on earlier in the week were mostly landscapes; images which could be but are not necessarily creepy.

A spider though? that’s creepy:

ISO 1250 f/3.5 1/60 0ev 50mm

This is a female Zebra Tarantula, common in Costa Rica.  Actually, this is mostly just a leg shot.  I was using my 50mm lens with a close up lens that actually looks more like a filter and screws onto my 50mm lens.  I thought that would be a nice way to focus on the leg striping and hair.

In Photoshop to create this sepia effect, I made a black and white layer but I also created a hue and saturation layer.  On the hue and saturation layer I clicked colorize and then moved the slider to the tone I wanted.  I then duplicated that layer and made the tone on that layer a bit different.  I put a mask on that layer and then masked some of the lower layer in.  Combining the two layers like that was a technique that I had never tried before. I liked the outcome.  In this case, I saved my cropping for last.  I wasn’t really sure when I started how the sepia tone might affect my choice of what to crop.  Here is the original image:

ISO 1250 f/3.5 1/60 0ev 50mm

So, what do you think? Do you prefer one image over the other?  I like the edit, but I do like my nature shots to look natural, so I like the original color image as well.  If I was to edit the original again and keep the color, I think I would pick a similar crop because I think the crop makes the image a lot stronger.  Feel free to comment below.

Cheers!