This is as much a photography post as a spider post. Even if you are not a huge spider fan, if you can stand looking at them at all you might like to look at the images as examples of what a good macro lens can do, even in the hands of an inexperienced photographer. Of course, if you like spiders, you will be in your element.
All spiders in these images are innocent orb spinners, the ones that create those spectacular webs in yards and gardens in the late summer and fall– the Spider Time spiders. They are not poisonous to anything bigger than an insect and don’t come in the house. We have wonderful spiders of this kind at work every year here at World Headquarters. They all look more or less alike and we assume that they are generations of the same long-resident family. We call them, collectively and sequentially, Webster.
A couple of weeks ago, I got to see them the day they emerged from their eggs. One of the things I hoped when I got my big new macro lens late last fall was that I would be able to photograph our spiders this year. It never occurred to me that I could get such an early start. These spiders are about the size of a large pinhead– smaller than the eraser of a pencil.
They are newborns; their hides haven’t hardened so they are still almost entirely transparent.
But you can see their little eyes! And the hairs on their little legs!
This one is a little older and has solidified a bit. You can already see the distinctive Webster colors emerging.
The images above are deep crops from the full sized versions of original images like this one. The texture you see in the background is the fake wood grain on an ordinary piece of vinyl siding. The field of view covers less than the width of one panel of the siding.
These are very, very tiny spiders. The lens is a 100mm macro telephoto, so they are already magnified quite a bit even before I started cropping– unmagnified, they looked just like little tannish dots crawling around on the side of the house.
As I stood there they were already spinning silk lines finer than any thread, preparing to move away from the nest site to seek their fortunes elsewhere in the yard. When I checked back an hour or so later, they were gone.
They’ll spend most of the summer hiding, eating, and growing, and the survivors will emerge as the season fades to spin their big beautiful webs in the night as this year’s Websters. I’m really looking forward to Spider Time. More on this story as it develops.
