I've seen photos of crab spiders before, and I've always thought they were awesome spiders. When I found one in our own garden, I was amazed. I spent the better portion of the evening photographing it.

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Tamron 180mm f/3.5 Di SP LD 1:1 Macro with Kenko Teleplus PRO 300 "DG" AF 2x Teleconverter for effective 360mm. 1 second at f/28.1. ISO 200. Post Production: Sharpen 100% 15 pixels, cropped (original).

Why This Photo: This is the first crab spider I've seen, so I took as many photos as I could. It was fairly aggressive and would posture like this whenever loud noises or quick motions happened. I wanted to try and capture that aggressive posturing.

What Works: I did some of the things I've been meaning to try and keep in mind with my macro work. The kind of stuff I did to try and make this photo better include:

• Used a tripod
• Smaller aperture for greater depth of field
• Timer delay (since I still don't have a remote trigger)
• Live View with zoom for better focusing
• Generous framing to allow for cropping if necessary

What Didn't Work: I wasn't thrilled with the framing, but since I left enough room, I was able to crop it down to something I liked more. The image was a bit out of focus, but I was able to sharpen it a little in Photoshop. I keep debating the exposure levels, feeling that the image is a bit blown out, but haven't been able to adjust the levels in Photoshop to my liking - though the cropping removed some of the problem by removing some of the extra areas of white flower pedals.

Working on these photos helped me to feel like I've come along way and have started to put some of the things I've learned into practice. At the same time, they's showed me how much more I have to learn.

What do you think? How did I do with this very special subject to shoot?

- Bill