My timing was both good and bad for this one. I’d seen a jumping spider wandering around on one of the potted plants on our back deck earlier, without thinking too much of it, but I was familiar enough with their appearance that when I came out a few hours later and found one of the leaves rolled up tightly, I knew it had just happened; peeking down the still-open end of the tube revealed the same spider (most likely, anyway) now ensconced within. A little earlier, and I might have seen her drawing the leaf closed for this shelter for her egg sac, while a little later and she might have been done with the eggs and have closed the tube completely. The magnification is high and the quarters are obviously tight, and she was deep enough in the tube to make lighting it almost impossible, but somehow the off-camera flash blasted through the leaf and illuminated her within, for much better results than I could have hoped.
I really would like to witness one drawing the shelter together in this way, but as you might imagine, that’s a very specific moment in time – or requires staking out a promising specimen and following her for dog-knows-how-long until she does so, if she deigns to do it with a photographer looming overhead. I know it looks like night here, but that’s the nature of shooting with a small aperture to have as much depth as possible, since the bulk of the light comes from the flash; this was taken right before noon in June here in NC, not exactly a time you want to just sit around in the sun and see if a particular spider actually does something interesting. Plus, I have done that, with virtually nothing to show for the weird sunburn and the headache. Still, one of these days…