Remember when I said we were going back as far as 2004? I lied.
This one’s from November 2003, when I traveled up from Florida to NC for a job interview and Jim and I were kicking back for a bit. I won’t say this is the first of my uncomfortably close spider portraits, but it’s the first with this kind of detail.
In the previous post I mentioned an exercise in shooting images to fit a topic, called the “Shoot-In,” and this was another produced for that (you may see more than a few, because my early digital work and the period that I was involved in the challenges largely coincide.) This topic was, “Bug’s Eye View,” so hopefully you get the idea.
This is likely a common house spider (Parasteatoda tepidariorum,) those bulbous pea-sized grey-brown suckers which should probably be called, “Under a chair in the basement” spiders since that’s where you will always find them. This particular one is dead, gassed with acetone to allow posing because I wanted this face shot; since then, my reputation has become so astounding that they pose willingly. Moreover, this is a macro technique that adapted fairly well to the Sony F717 fixed lens camera, something called, ‘lens stacking.’ Put a 50mm lens reversed onto the end of a telephoto, like 150 to 300mm, and you’ll get some wicked magnification, albeit with a good amount of distortion around the edges as seen here – I’ll probably provide another example in a later installment of the title topic. If you want to try it, determine the filter threads on the two lenses that you want to use and look for ‘double coupling ring’ on Ebay – should cost no more than a few bucks.
By the way, I won’t leave you hanging: I didn’t get the job, though I did get a different position with the same place a few months later on, which prompted my move back to NC. The job, at least, turned out to be a complete waste of time and mental effort, but I met The Girlfriend there, so there’s that…