Wouldn’t it be a great diorama, about a thousand times life size?
For Halloween this year, I feature a jumping spider, most likely an Habronattus pyrrithrix (what a great name,) peering out from around the edge of a dog fennel stalk. I captured this while in pursuit of another subject one evening a few years ago, and the flash angle was ideal to produce the ominous effect with the shadows – had I tried to set this up, I would have been playing around a lot to find the precise angle necessary and the spider, as impatient as the entire family is, would have buggered off. And while the mere presence of a spider makes it ominous, there’s also the huddled and apparently wide-eyed ‘expression,’ making it seem as if the spider is hiding from something much worse, just out of the frame. What do spiders have nightmares of, I wonder?
It’s also the end of the month, and this time I have an offering for the kinda-but-not-quite tradition of featuring an abstract at months’ end, something I’ve missed for the past few.
It’s perhaps not too hard to determine that this is a leaf wet with dew, catching the morning sun and seen largely out of focus – this is a crop from a larger frame. What captured my attention were the peculiar effects of the reflections, some of them showing crosswise bars in all orientations. I haven’t actually figured out what causes this yet, so if you know, feel free to respond. It’s probably something supernatural…