Photography: So many spiders

Last fall, while we were in Florida for a rocket launch, we decided to check out the many nature reserves along the way. We came across one that had a nice walkway through the swampland, and I thought it would be a great chance to try the Canon T3i dSLR that we had just purchased.

I tend to take pictures of just about anything, but wildlife photos can be a lot of fun. The photos from yesterday’s blog about the elk is a great example of how I like to take photos of large animals. But I also like to take shots of very tiny creatures as well.

Now, I might be going a bit too far, because there was very little to be considered “small” about the spiders I took photos of in Florida.

I’m pretty sure that some of them are Golden Orb Weaving spiders, but that’s almost a guess. There’s a shot of one of them, too, that doesn’t look at all like the others. If you do know what they are, please let me know in the comments or on my social media.

On to the spiders. 

This first one, the darkest of the photos, was one of the first times I tried to manual focus with the camera. It just could not decide if it wanted to focus on the web, the spider, or the background. I’m sure my inexperience has a lot to do with that, but I also wanted to try the manual focus abilities as well. Click on it (and all of the photos) for a larger version.

 The fascinating thing was that the spiders were all different colors, and some of them even multiple colors. This yellow one here, we almost walked right into. This would be a totally different kind of blog had that been the case.

 We then found a reddish one facing the other direction. I thought taking a shot of the underside of the spider would be pretty cool, so I shot away.

Here’s a closer crop of that, and I think the camera did a great job of capturing not only the web, but the detail in the spider as well. It actually fires up my imagination quite a lot.

Here’s the one spider that’s different from the rest. It almost looks armored, and I thought it looked pretty cool. Again, I thought the camera did a great job of capturing the detail. To me, this one actually does look creepy, like it’s just waiting for me to walk underneath it.

We didn’t.

This last one not only had a really bright yellow color to it, but it was off of the path in the trees. It made it a little easier to take a shot of it, since many of the others were literally over the path itself. 

 Also, that white area really looks like a skull to me. Take a closer look, it’s wicked cool and I’m glad the camera was able to capture it.

 Let me know what you think of the spiders, and the photos too. I’m somewhere between fascinated with nature and creeped out by it.