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Monday, February 05, 2007

Lady Wolf

Here's our wolf spider. I found her in the morning, defrosting on the sunny wall of the 500 building at Fitzsimmons. I dumped the last bit of my coffee out, dried the mug and put in a little dirt and a stick, then nudged in the spider. It's saying something that I love spiders more than coffee. Okay, had it been a new full steaming cup it would have been a toss up. In any case, she's out guest now.

Her body is about three centimeters, but honestly I need to measure her for the real numbers. She's the largest wolf spider I've seen outside the Butterfly pavilion. It's also a pedipalp guess that this is a female. She's a beauty though and doesn't seem to mind her new home with central heating and food delivery.

Here I was messing with lighting (my three white LED reading light supplemented with overhead incandescents), long exposurse (between twenty and thirty seconds) and my new Sigma macro lens. Photo processing by Picasa leaves something to be desired, but I might fool around with it using Adobe.
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2 comments:

Matt Dick said...

Oh very nice!

I've had bacd luck recently with my spider shots. The bottom of our garage door collects these beautiful little shiny brown and tan girls with their egg sacks. A few times a day they get to ride up and down and then I can walk under them and admire them. The problem is that they're inconvenient to photograph, and I am reluctant to move them since they are always well ensconced in their webs with egg sacks and meals-in-waiting. I don't want to mess up their lives, but they're great-looking.

Anyway, bravo on getting an actual view of the large eyes protuding a bit.

adivhqh

Hypatia said...

Thanks. :) Generally spiders hold pretty still if they think someone might be looking. This required the tripod and the captive spider. The reading light made a big difference in the protruding eyes. I'll upload some variations.

This wolf is a regular pet (we also have a tarantula spiderling), so she's always available for a photoshoot. It just costs me a well-fed cricket.

For in situ spiders, things can get more complicated. I generally try not to move any spider if possible. We have a few garage spiders with egg sacks too -- I think they're a type of cobweb spider.

I think these are the only spiders I've seen for a while. We're just starting to see ground again as the snow melts... just in time for another snowfall this weekend.

UGH! Seven consecutive weekends of snow. We haven't had our big snowfall months yet (March and April) 62" when our yearly average is 61".