Posts in Category: spider web
Costa Rica! Writing or zig-zag spider
Spiny-backed Orb-weaver Spider: Selva Verde Lodge and Reserve, Sarapique Valley, Costa Rica, December 2023 — We found several of these “writing” or “zig-zag” spiders as the locals call them (because of the patterns in the web), under one of the cabins at Selva Verde on a morning photo walk. I put the macro capabilities of the 100-400 IS zoom to work. This is a member of one of two genus of spiders collectively called spiny-backed because they share the pointy spins. Both are in the Orb-weaver family. OM-Systems OM-1 with ED 100-400mm IS zoom at 454mm equivalent. Program mode with my custom birds and wildlife modifications. -1.0EV to keep detail in the spider against the dark background. This shot was at ISO 25600 by the way. 🙂 Processed in Photomator.
Orb Weaver on the Kennebunk Plains. Happy Sunday!
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I got to the Kennebunk Plains and Day Brook Pond early enough this week to catch the dew on the spiderwebs, and there were some spectacular webs. 🙂 The angle of the sun was just right to light them up. After photographing this particular web for effect, I noticed that it, unlike most of the others, was still inhabited, so I took a little detour off the path for a closer look. It is clearly some kind of Orb Weaver, but I can’t pin it down more than that. This is, to me, a very satisfying image…I love the light caught in the droplets on the web, the detail and color of the spider, and the out-of-focus landscape in the background making a horizon.
Sony HX400V at about 68mm equivalent field of view. Macro. ISO 80 @ 1/1600th @ f3.5. Program with -1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
And for the Sunday Thought: I know many people have a thing about bugs, and spiders in particular. It is perhaps (as I am pretty sure has been suggested many times by better men than I) a residual fear based on the fact that some of them can hurt us, and a very few of them can kill us. Same with snakes. It seems to be more a female thing…perhaps maternal, as in protecting the helpless infants and hapless kids from all that might harm them. If it is not instinctive in males, it can certainly be learned. To really see a spider we have to sidestep that fear if it is still in us. Then too, spiders break the leg rule. They have too many legs, too many limbs. Everything we love has 4 limbs. Spiders have two extra. What’s up with that? Creepy.
On the other hand, who does not love a spider web jeweled with dew? Logic tells us that a web needs a spider, but we are not always logical…we are rarely logical when it comes to what we like and dislike, and almost never logical in what we fear.
On the other hand, the spirit compels us to view all that lives as beautiful, because it was created by a loving God, the same God that created us. The web of life should be as appealing as a spider web jeweled with dew in the morning sun, and each creature a drop on the web, refracting the pure light of creation in its own unique way. The spider has its beauty if we are willing to look closely enough. If we are willing to know spiders.
And of course, one of the things we learn to know is that a few of them can, if we do not give them their space, hurt us. We know who they are and learn to respect them, and, unless one ends up in your sleeping bag, as a Brown Recluse did in mine on a trip to Arizona, they will not bother us. The scar on my leg is a good reminder to check my sleeping bag before getting in. We learn to give all spiders, all creatures, the space they need to live. Not simply because they might be dangerous, but because they are, each one in its own way, lovely…created with love.
Happy Sunday!
The spider and the dragon
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When I went out yesterday to mow the front yard, there were a dozen or more tiny, late-season, dark-legged, off-colored Meadowhawks flying low and perching often. Most likely they were female or immature male White-faced Meadowhawks, but I can not be at all certain. As I was photographing this one close in under the eves of the house, it flew up and right into a spider web. I considered freeing it, but then the spider, which had been hiding under the lower edge of the siding on the house, scuttled out and attacked. So be it. Spiders got to do what spiders got to do. And I am almost as fond of spiders as I am of dragonflies. I think this is just one of the grass spiders…a funnel weaver of some kind, though the web seemed sticky enough at least to trap the dragon…or else its legs just got so well tangled that despite best efforts it could not free itself. An hour later the spider had worked the dragon almost completely up under the siding on the house. For scale here, the dragonfly is maybe an inch and a quarter long (3 cm) and I was shooting from about that same distance.
Sony HX400V. 68mm equivalent field of view, macro. ISO 200 @ 1/80th @ f3.5. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Spider Web in the Morning: Happy Sunday!
A week ago I was in Arcata California. This is from Saturday morning there, after a night of gentle rain and a misty dawn. The spider webs at Arcata Marsh Nature Center were spectacularly jeweled and drapped the bushes in webs of refracted light. I could not resist framing a few with the long end of the 600mm equivalent zoom on the Olympus OM-D E-M10, and then, this morning, collaging three into this composite image.
And for the Sunday Thought: It seems like it ought to be something about transcience and fragile beauty…considering both the fragility of the webs and how temporary the jeweling of the moisture is. These webs, if they survive the morning, will be next to invisible once the moisture drys off the strands. They will go back to being the efficient insect traps they were intended to be.
But I am not feeling either transient or fragile (relatively speaking) this morning. That Saturday I was. I was suffering my first real experience of the full discomfort of acid reflux, and thought I might be having a heart attack…and I was certainly feeling my vunerabiliy, and every moment of my age. I felt like one of those webs…my moments of life like the beads of moisture hung suspended on a fragile web of being. I am considerably better now. Once I figured out what was happening to me, and started on Prilosec OTC and Zantac, the effects began to moderate, and and have receeded to memory now (though I do have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning just for reasurrance). I have lost the fragile, suspended feeling.
Now, when I look at these webs I see strength…astounding strength. I see a miracle of engineering in the service of life that comes close to defying the laws of physics. I see beauty in the way the light is collected, focused, in each bead of moisture…how together they turn the dim light of the misty morning into something to wonder at. And I am perfectly willing to see my life as one of those webs…my precious moments strung on a intricate network of intelligence, each strand the ample strength of a faith in the living God. Come breeze and blow. Come sun and dry. You can not erase the wonder of the misty dawn, caught in dew on a spider’s web. You can not erase me. Not because of who I am, but because of who God is! It is good to be alive today. Sunday. Happy Sunday!
Titmouse. Happy Sunday!
I am not sure what this bird has been into. It looks like it might be spider web…but on this day with a foot of fresh snow on the ground, I don’t know where the Titmouse would have found a web. It could be cocoon material…or it might just be fine breast feathers from preening. The bird landed on the rail of the deck, about 3 feet from the thermopane window while I was photographing birds at the deck feeding station. I got off this one good shot before it moved on…probably right after looking up, as it clearly is here, and seeing me behind the glass. This is a full frame, uncropped shot, and taken from about as close as the Canon SX50HS will focus at the long end of the zoom. Though some detail is lost to the thermopane, at this distance there is detail to spare!
Canon SX50HS. 1200mm equivalent field of view. ISO 640 @ 1/750th @ f6.5. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And for the Sunday Thought. It is rare for me to post a bird, or any animal, image on Sunday…though at least one third, going on one half, of my photographs overall must be birds (and bugs). I am not sure why…perhaps because, in season, I already post a lot of birds and bugs, and Sunday should have something different…on the theory that different means special. Birds and bugs are my ordinary…Sunday should be, in the spirit of celebration, extraordinary (or at least unordinary, if we can not manage extra).
Or maybe, though I hope this is not true, it is because the single-minded self-centered will to live that is so evident in the feathered and winged somehow obscures the spirit for me. That would be sad, and if true, is certainly something I hope will be fixed before I am finished. 🙂
Because, of course, that single minded, self-centered will to live is a projection. The bird is not aware of being self-centered or single-minded. It is only aware, if you can call it awareness, of the will to live. It, in fact, simply is the will to live.
It appears that only we humans, who share that same will to live, as it is an essential expression of the Spirit in space and time, have to guard against the single-minded and self-centered aspect of it. We have been given the gift of care…the gift of knowing, of realizing, that we share time and space with the Titmouse, and that we must make room for the Titmouse to live beside us. We have been given the gift of knowing that we share time and space with each other…beyond the bounds of mate and nestlings, flock and kind, we know we share time and space with all that is, and, at our best, when the Spirit is most full in us, we care. That gift of caring, that gift of love, is, I think, what it means to be human. If we have a special place in the heart of the Creator, and I believe we do, it is because we have inherited the gift of care for all that is that is at the core of creation. That is an awesome, and an aweful gift…and our movement toward embracing it is the measure of our true humanity…of the progress of the Spirit in us.
And maybe that is why I don’t post more images of birds on Sunday. 🙂
Happy Sunday!
The Universe in a Spider Web: Happy Sunday!
I don’t know why, but this simple image of water drops on a spider web covering grasses and leaves from my photoprowl around the yard yesterday morning seems to contain the whole universe…from the tiny detail among the grasses, to the vast expanse of the starry sky. I could look at it for a long time. Click on the image to open it in the lightbox where you can view it as large as your monitor allows.
Samsung Galaxy S4 in Rich Tone / HDR mode. Processed on the phone with PicSay Pro.
And for the Sunday Thought: The universe in every atom of the universe, eternity in every second of time, is a thought as old as thinking itself. It has occurred to poets, certainly…to philosophers…to scientists…to anyone who has closely observed life and being. It is, according to the universal testimony of people from all religions, an essential element of the “mystical experience”…of transcendence…of any intimate contact with the spirit of all that is…any contact with a God worthy of the name. There are only two responses available to us in such contacts: fear and awe. And fear is just awe without hope…without the feeling of overwhelming love which makes such an experience of the all in all both bearable and glorious. Fear drives us down. Awe lifts us up. Fear causes flight or fight response…and a tightened hold on our lives and our selves. Awe causes us to let go of ourselves, and fly willingly to an embrace in infinite love. Fear holds tight to what is. Awe lets go to the beauty and rightness of what will be.
Just occasionally that experience gets caught in an image, as, for me, it does here…in the water droplets covering the spider web over wet grass and leaves, in my yard, on an ordinary morning after a night of rain.
Spider in the sun, weaving rainbows. Happy Sunday!
My workshop yesterday was at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, which is adjacent to the Union Bay Natural Area. The whole area used to be a city dump…but the city and the University of Washington Botanical Gardens reclaimed the land and turned it into wonderful little chunk of nature along the shores of Lake Washington. It is a great spot for bird watching, walking your dog, jogging, etc. Between the Horticulture Center and the lake is Yesler Swamp, which is also being developed. There are temporary trails leading down on the east and west to the lagoon off Lake Washington and plans to build a boardwalk over the wetter swamp and the lagoon to complete the loop.
This spider, which I have not had time to id, was one of several who had constructed very large webs along the east trail. The angle of the morning sun was just right so that the web diffracted the light and created a “rainbow” effect (minus the rain…I suppose it is more accurate to say the web diffracted the light into is spectrum 🙂 Whatever…the effect was quite striking.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought. Almost everyone knows that what we call white light is really made up all the colors in the spectrum…reds and blues and greens and violets. We see it most often in a rainbow; occasionally cast on a wall by prism hanging in a window; more rarely, early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is low, across the face of street sign painted with luminous reflective paint full of glass beads; and very rarely indeed in something natural like this spider web hanging in the sun. Still, often enough so when we stop to think about it, we know white light is, miraculously, all the colors combined.
But we don’t often stop to think about it. We take white light for granted. We forget that red things are red because they reflect the red light within the white…and green things are green because they reflect the green. As a photographer, ie, one who plays with light all the time, I am a bit more aware, but not so much that I can’t be taken by surprise by a spider web in the sun.
I have said before that love is the light of eternity…of, if you will, the realm of the spirit. Many who encounter God come away with impression of the pure white light…again, remembering that that light is love. And yet, since what we experience in the physical realm of time and space is a physical manifestation of the eternal, the love/light of the spirit has to be made up of all the colors of the rainbow, or we would not see all the colors of eternity. There must be a red love/light and a green love/light within the white love/light of God’s presence. Each of us, each of our lives, must reflect back our particular color. Certainly that would explain a lot about the variety of love we see in human beings.
Rarely, there might be a life, or even a second of a life, that is so lived as to show all the colors of God’s love. It might be some instant as fragile as a spider web in the morning sun beside a trail in a swamp in Seattle…but it would be a moment to treasure, a life to treasure and to celebrate. Or that’s what I think.
Yellow Garden Spider with Widow Skimmer Wing
If you don’t like spiders you might want to look away!
I was making a lunch hour photoprowl on my Pondhawk-green electric scooter yesterday, walking around Quest Pond to see if any new dragonflies were out, when my work phone rang. I sat down on the bank as it looked like it might be a lengthy call (a three way conference call, and you know how those go) and right there, not 5 feet in front of me in the reeds bordering the pond, just at my sitting eyelevel, was this spider in its web with prey. I could not see, holding the camera up with one hand as I talked, what exactly the spider had caught, but I suspected it was a dragonfly…what else at Quest Pond? It is actually the wing of Widow Skimmer…which has even less meat on it than a chicken wing. I hope the spider was not wanting more than a snack.
For non spider fans, this is the common Yellow Garden Spider, and despite its fierce looks and large size (this female was close to an inch long in the body), it is actually not a bad neighbor, as it generally dines on insects we like even less. I have mixed feelings about the Widow Skimmer…but if was going to take any dragonfly, there are certainly enough Widow Skimmers at Quest Pond this summer so that one will not be missed. If you can get by the fact that it is a spider, you have to admit there is a certain attraction to the bold yellow and black pattern…kind of like police tape at a disaster scene 🙂
And yes, it was a lengthy call.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1 EV exposure compensation. 1240mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter function). f5.8 @ 1/640th @ ISO 125.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
10/3/2010: Peat Bog details
Happy Sunday!
As I said yesterday, the peat bog at Quoddy Head State Park is a vibrant habitat. I don’t know how it looks in spring or summer, but in fall, the dense mix of mosses and lichens, in shades of red and green (and even white) form a rich carpet, dotted with an amazing abundance of pitcher plants, most of which in this season are deep red or even purple. The closer you look the more inspiring it becomes. The contrasts of color and texture and form, and the variety packed into every square foot, are, to my eye, wonderfully beautiful.
It makes me want, as few habitats to, to study…to find out what all these plants are and how they are related. The carpet of the bog is so alive…I want to know how it works. There has to be a fascinating story in anything so intricate and so beautiful.
And, of course (being Sunday), while there is certainly a science that makes up the story, for me it will always be the story of a Creator from whom I inherit the eye and the heart that can appreciate such intricate beauty: that can stand in awe and respond in worship.
This is the kind of environment and the kind of work that brings out the best in the Canon SX20IS. This set of shots runs from one end of the macro zoom range to the other; several would have been very difficult, shooting from the narrow boardwalk, without the lip out LCD viewer; and the detail shots, in the dim light of foggy day, are all at an impressive ISO 200. And I can fully appreciate the beauty in Canon’s accomplishment as well.
Of course, I do plan a trip back to Quoddy Head in the spring to see what the peat bog looks like then!
9/20/2010: Dew wapa dew
I was there to do some HDR of the sky and beach…but when something like this is on offer, it would be most ungrateful not to take a moment to work it. And gratitude is a central tenet of my photographic method…or maybe philosophy…whatever. I try not to pass up any opportunity.
I like the dew on the spider web, but it is not easy to catch in a way that does justice to its native impression. Here the rose-hips, withered and ripe, are a definite bonus, providing a secondary focus at the strong point of the composition.
Canon SX20IS at 400mm equivalent and macro. F5.0 @ 1/400th @ ISO 80. Programmed auto.
Recovery on Lightroom for the highlights on the web, Blackpoint adjustment, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen narrow edges preset.
And, of course, when I say work it, I mean more than one exposure and angle.
This shot is cropped just a bit, both by zooming out to 560mm equivalent, and in Lightroom (from the bottom).
Flipping out the lcd for a low angle shot, and zooming to around 500mm, gives an alternative view, again cropped in Lightroom.
Like I said…make the most of any opportunity!