This week’s entry is slightly fudged, in that I had featured the species in a post a few months earlier, only I hadn’t identified it then; I determine the choices for these posts by tags (in this case names) that have appeared just once, but technically, this doesn’t count. Too bad, because we’re using it anyway – seriously, it’s a cool shot that I was quite lucky to get.
This is a Florinda coccinea, a type of sheetweb spider that typically makes webs stretched between blades of grass, as this one was, and it’s often extremely hard to even know the webs are there unless it’s a dewy morning. To get this shot, I had to be lying on my side on the ground with the camera sideways, shooting horizontally underneath the web itself, and some idea of how tight the quarters were can be deduced by the dewdrop adhering to the spiders head; this is quite a small specimen, with adults averaging 3-3.5mm in body length – that’s half the diameter of a standard pencil. In getting ready to take this shot, i spooked the yellowish leafhopper nymph into the web and provided the meal for the spider, which may have helped me get this frame, since the spider was intent on the meal and far less likely to scoot under cover at my proximity.
A closer look at the same frame:
The dewdrop, which is roughly one millimeter in diameter, acts as a lens here that inverts the image behind and around it, and in this case down at the bottom, it’s showing the dew on the sheetweb above illuminated by the flash softbox, which was well above the web itself (and did a marvelous job of illuminating the scene, evenly and without harsh highlights or deep shadows – go back up and look at the mottled coloration on the spider’s abdomen.) In fact, at the top of the dewdrop, you’re seeing the reflection of the softbox itself – you can see the rig better here, though a couple years later I inadvertently fried the unit, which was a shame because it was almost impossible to replace and had worked so well. But the replacements all had a significant upgrade, which was a circular diffuser panel rather than rectangular, making the reflections of it much more natural looking when they occurred.