Creepy crawlies

That's a creepy view - even if they are baby spiders. Using the flash to get the background dark and letting us focus on the spider crowd, but also avoiding too harsh contrasts end overexposed parts, contributed a lot to the overall impact. The only thing that could be even better would have been avoiding the cropped spider in the upper left - and we know that isn't easy to avoid.

It rarely happens that an interesting and unusual subject, technical perfection meet a fitting composition and a contributing light situation. Those are the ingredients to get a worthy winner.. The decent post processing without overuse of sharpening helped a lot too. Congratulations! PS: we know how fast those guys can be.

There's a lot we love in that photo: the look of mantis, the placement of subject and its shadow, and light situation. This makes the photo stand out from most of the entries. There are just some parts in the photo which distract the eye, like the dominating part in the left or the light in the background, but we understand it's not easy to avoid such things in the field.

We liked that photo instantly because of its colours, depth of field and good composition - and that cute spider. What this photo would have needed to get commended or even into top 10 is much more sharpness and details of the main subject. The petal coming from out of the corner could have been the better choice, either by cropping to square format or by another point of view.

The pose and the very low point of view make this photo stand out from many entries. Seeing such a photo raises the question what has been done to provoke such a pose, but we know from our experience that sometimes it doesn't need much - like someone passing by or just the hand manually focusing the lens. Coming back to the photo we instantly liked the natural colours and the quality and look of the bokeh. Congrats!