This Jumping spider (Hyllus sp - female) killed these moths (Amata species) in their mating stage and ate them.

Taxonomic Position of the insect: Predator - Jumping Spider - Hyllus sp - female

Prey - Amata Moth

Area Description:

Salt Lake Central Park, Large, tranquil park & green space popular for jogging, bird watching & a scenic lake. (Fourth Ave, Central Park, Sector III, Salt Lake City, Kolkata, West Bengal 700064)

Personal Experience during the shoot:

While I was attending a macro workshop in our City, suddenly I found this spider with this prey. I found this Jumping spider (Hyllus sp - female) had killed these moths (Amata species) in their mating stage and was feeding on them. This moment was extremely rare for me, so I captured this for a great record.

I love jumping spider a lot. And I am very much passionate about macro photography. And so that moment was precious for me. While taking the photographs, I was not sure if I could take it, as the spider was hiding in a bush. But fortunately, I managed to capture some decent shots. That made me extremely happy.

Different constraints a photographer faced in this genre:

Macro photography is one of the toughest genres of photography which is a sub category of wildlife photography. In macro photography there are some big differences with other types of photography which makes this genre an extremely challenging one.

The subjects are small and difficult to identify:

The macro subjects are too small to identify and sometimes they are almost invisible to naked human eye. It requires long practice and constant searching process to get the interesting subjects in frame.

Lighting:

You'll often need to supplement available light with a flash to be able to use such small apertures (like F:16, F:22 etc) and a reasonable shutter speed. Standard in-camera flash will often cast a shadow of the lens into the scene. A couple of special flash designs solve this problem - one is a ring light that is, like it sounds, a ring of lights positioned around the lens of your camera. There are also dual flash mounting systems to move a pair of flashes forward from the standard hot shoe to counteract the shadow problem.

The greater the magnification, the more light you need. The problem is that as you increase magnification your lens is getting closer to the subjects, making it harder to illuminate. A lens with longer focal length will help, other options are a ring flash, high intensity LED lights and off camera flash.

Shallow Depth of Field:

At macro ranges, even with a small aperture (e.g. f:16, f:22) your depth of field (the amount of the scene that is in focus) could be in the range of a few millimetres to a few centimetres. It's also a challenge to maintain the desired area in focus, especially if the camera is handheld. If your camera shifts just a few millimetres, you could throw your subject completely out of focus. Therefore, tripods are essential, and a slide is often used to 'fine-focus' by shifting the position of the camera.