Today dawned cloudy with some sprinkles, and then it cleared for a while. Adrienne had stepped out into the backyard to admire our spring flowers, and I heard her say "hey, come and see this... it's really cool." I had no idea what it might be, but she pointed to a spot above our fence. I looked. At first I didn't see anything, then I saw the faint line with a bunch of little moving objects. It was a single silk thread with hundreds of spider hatchlings going down (most of the time) from their egg sac beneath the soffets to the top of the fence, and eventually, all over the yard and elsewhere. Each one was maybe 2mm long. At times they looked like a string of beads, and sometimes they would clump together, or spread out in some seemingly organized fashion. Amazing to watch.
I got out my Nikon D70s and used my 60mm micro-Nikkor and added the Nikon 6T diopter for some extra magnification. The image on flickr can be enlarged, but all I did was crop it to give it a more vertical orientation.
Macro work is where the DSLR really shines.
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lovely photo!
ReplyDeleteSo cool, how'd you get the background?
ReplyDeleteThanks, Becca!
ReplyDeleteKathi -- it's actually an easy one - when shooting true macro, the depth of field is only a cm or lesss at the aperture I was using. So, the spiders were in focus (mostly) but the background will be very out of focus, especially the farther away it is from the camera. The green was likely the row of cedar trees along our fenceline. Glad you enjoyed the photo!