What is becoming the norm with this blog, I am pushing to meet my post quota for the month. I’ve been pretty busy as of late and my extra hours as of late has been spent in therapy and late night workouts. Luckily, I have line of site to the rest of this month so no dangers on the content front. This particular post is going to revisit a post I had made some time back. Once again, I was out on the porch one night and came across another opportunity to drag out the camera. Any chance you remember the previous post on the Wolf Spider? Well, those were taken with a 70-200mm zoom glass. Earlier this year, we purchased a macro glass (105mm) that provides a ton of fun. I am still feeling my way around this type of photography and still have a lot to learn.
Once again, our dog Rizzi once again found the specimen. He loves to check out all the creatures on the porch, but tends to get waaaay to close for my comfort. When he found this spider, I ended up picking him up and moving him away as soon as I saw his nose going for it.
As mentioned before, spiders are safe around me unless they cross the Loon coin size. This one was definitely beyond that limit by almost 2x. I didn’t have a scale indicator and decided against sticking my finder down by it, so you will just need to trust me on that. Again, still working on getting these shots down. I needed to open the Fstop up to get the entire body in focus, but for the most part it came out okay. It definitely has a different feel that the spider shots did with the zoom. This image came out a little better.
Pretty creepy eh? While prepping the pictures for the blog, something kept nagging me about these two shots. Eventually it came to me what was odd. Anything you know about spiders seem contrary to these two images? Hint, it is in the numbers. I ended up verifying my arachnid knowledge just to validate my initial thought. Spiders do indeed have 8 legs, but it looks like this specimen only has 6. Turns out, what I thought were leg shadows, were actually doubled up legs. Not sure why it was doing this but it may have been a defensive posture in order to propel it out of the way faster if Rizzi’s nose got a little too close.
Since the macro was on, it was time to move in for the cool shots. It became very obvious I needed to get some stabilization under the camera to get some quality shots… but it was late and I was feeling the pull of the pillow. I did get one fairly decent shot… extremely creepy I might add.
I can’t image the fear an insect must face having this ball of ugliness bearing down on it. I should mention that I am not an expert spider cataloger so if I happen to get these identified wrong, please let me know. Typically, the wolf spider is a little more furry than this one, but everything else (coloring, size etc.) seemed to match. Oh, and if you are wondering how this turned out for the subject, you may be happy (or not depending on your fear) to know that I let it live. Of course, now it will probably mate with an equally sized spider resulting in 10 billion offspring the size of a CD. My only hope is Rizzi finds them before they launch their plans to take back their woods.
