{"id":42437,"date":"2026-08-22T15:18:01","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T19:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=42437"},"modified":"2026-08-22T15:18:01","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T19:18:01","slug":"sorting-captures-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2026\/08\/sorting-captures-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorting captures (1?)"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, we’re all already familiar with the sorting finds, the images that I come across when sorting all of the recent photos into the appropriate folders that I then realize I should feature in a post;<\/strong> you may wonder why I didn’t do this initially upon unloading the memory cards, but I either found something else that had a higher priority, or was too busy at the time, or simply hadn’t looked closely enough at certain images to recognize the merit that they had. But whatever, stop sidetracking me.<\/p>\n

In this case, we’re featuring a couple of images captured<\/em> while doing the sorting, a first I believe. Last night I was deep into the overdue task and happened to glance down to find the office\/studio\/lair chair was in imminent danger of rolling over my next subject. This is not, in and of itself, a rarity – having a basement office with an outside door in an older house means critters, mostly arthropods but occasionally not, are frequent visitors. This one, however, seemed slightly misshapen, and upon capturing it I confirmed why.<\/p>\n

\"female
Yep, a wolf spider mama taking the young out for their first real adventure, trying to get rolled or stepped on. She was easy to capture and get into the pan I use for such ‘studio’ shots, but far less cooperative in staying away from the edges so it looked more natural – she was even more averse to the leaves I provided that would have made an even better setting. I am lucky in that the ridge on the side of the planter tray that I used, combined with the color of the table thereon showing through the translucent plastic, actually appears more like brickwork than anything else. Plus short depth-of-field, of course. Let’s get creepier.<\/p>\n

\"cluster
She was moving a little sluggishly for the species, perhaps because of the young, but it meant I could focus better on her and the bebbehs, and she only shifted immediately after I achieved sharp focus about five times, which is ahead of the game for such sessions. None of the young-uns showed the slightest inclination to even twitch a leg.<\/p>\n

These were with the 180mm macro, but I switched to the reversed 28-105 to try and get closer, without the best results.<\/p>\n

\"cluster
The dark patches in there are the ‘faces’ of two of the newborns – you can see that they typically use their legs to hide their identities, which makes me realize:<\/strong> eight eyes, eight legs, so they can still play peekaboo. Evolution is amazing. Focus could have been better of course, but part of the problem was, achieving truly close focus means having the lens very<\/em> close to the subject, and the edges of the planter tray were actually interfering. Also, the range of sharpest focus is within a millimeter, and since I was shooting handheld (albeit propped on the table where I could,) this mean sharp focus was more a matter of timing my trivial swaying in and out of that range, with more misses than hits. But why weren’t you using a tripod and a macro slider?<\/em> you ask, a trifle impertinently, but I’ll patiently explain that such things are nigh worthless with living subjects, since they require said subjects to remain cooperatively in one place while all this is set up – good luck with that. Generally, you have between two and ten seconds to pin down sharp focus before your subject buggers off to a different position, and you will then spend that same timeframe trying to get everything lined up again, even with a tray like this that you can slide around. This was not my first spider rodeo…<\/p>\n

While I was doing this, I decided to tackle a subject that had been waiting for a couple of days, so I deposited mama and the fry back outside and turned to this one. The other night, as I approached a golden silk orbweaver (Trichonephila clavipes<\/em>) in her web, I was observing some odd movements and, even as I suspected I knew what was happening, I saw her free her recently molted exoskeleton from the web and drop it – timing was just a little off on that one. However, I collected the exoskeleton and brought it in for a macro session, but then didn’t tackle it for a few days. This seemed to be a good time.<\/p>\n

\"front
This was one of the initial shots with the 180mm macro, a little blown out but it got light down to the eyes and chelicerae like I was after. However, I needed to be closer and more detailed, so it was back to the reversed 28-105.<\/p>\n

\"extreme
This took several tries to get right, because I was trying to get both the eyes and the chelicerae in the same plane of focus – imagine trying this with a living subject that prefers to hang vertically. But you can easily see the eye arrangement, with the four outer eyes facing sideways on little eyebumps. I should have been creative and gotten some light source down under and behind the cephalothorax to shine up through the eyes – maybe next time. But since I also got those fangs in focus, I’m good with this. So you know, the space between the topmost eyes and the bottom of the chelicerae measures a whopping 5.4 mm – try getting that precise measurement with a living subject. I also must note that this is only about half of full adult size for the species, female anyway. We don’t seem to have quite as many on the property as we did last year, but how many do you really need? Okay then.<\/p>\n

All right, back to sorting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, we’re all already familiar with the sorting finds, the images that I come across when sorting all of the recent photos into the appropriate folders that I then realize I should feature in a post; you may wonder why I didn’t do this initially upon unloading the memory cards, but I either found something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[1234,3952,1856,1233,3422,7723,6954,15],"class_list":["post-42437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-photo","tag-exoskeleton","tag-golden-silk-orbweaver","tag-lycosidae","tag-molting","tag-newborns","tag-spiderlings","tag-trichonephila-clavipes","tag-wolf-spider"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42437"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42446,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42437\/revisions\/42446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}