Macro Spider Fun

Finally I got a chance to break out the camera and wander around the yard with my macro rig in place. I'm sure I look strange enough to the neighbors - an old fat guy with a big ass camera rooting in the weeds and flower bed taking pictures of stuff so small you can't see it. No matter, it was a fruitful day. I got three or four images I consider "keepers". Here's my favorite - a little spider having a snack in one of my wife's peonies. He was remarkably relaxed for a little while, letting me shoot five or six images of him before he went scuttling down into the flower to finish in peace. Here's another one.

I shot some pictures of some tiny flowers the wife keeps in the garden, and one of them revealed the legs of a white flower spider, so I had to go back and get pictures of her. By then the sky had darkened with clouds, so I had to go with straight flash (instead of the flash/daylight composite above). She's an interesting looking critter, anyway. That flower is less than an inch across; she's maybe half an inch from toetip to toetip. She was very shy, scuttling around to the other side of the flower every time I got too close with my lens. She was probably just upset that I was scaring off her buffet.

Finally, I got a floral image that I was very fond of. It's a close-up of the center of a rose that grows in the garden outside my daughter's room. It's done with daylight and my Vivitar 283, and is extremely sharp at 100% pixel-peeper enlargement. I like the way the shadows fell and the detail visible in the center of the rose. All in all, a day when I can find three or four images that I like is a pretty good day.