Jai Daemion, The Spider's Vision - Fractured Webs in Sunlight (January theme: Abstract)

When photographing spider webs in early morning dew, there is a very interesting phenomenon that I have often used to dramatically increase the effect in this kind of shot. There is a very specific point in relation to light source, the camera angle and my spider web subject, where the sunlight diffracts into beautiful rainbow colours. If you move a few mm. this way or that, the diffraction disappears. This shot was made using a Nikon FE film camera, on Kodachrome 64, with a 50mm f/1.2 lens reversed us2ing a special mount. This combination gives an almost 1:1 macro image with absolutely minimal depth of field (focus). The film transparency was then scanned using a Nikon Supercoolscan 5000. K64 does not scan well in this scanner, so the resulting images need to be adjusted for contrast and light before they are really identical to the original tranny. The digital image - scanned at 4000dpi/16bits - was then tweaked in Photoshop. However, all colours as they appear here are true to the original image.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.