Repeat after me: coxa, trochanter, femur, patella, tibia, metatarsus, tarsus. Repeat 8 times. Now you can name all the segments in a spider limb!

So flexible!

Here’s a juvenile S. borealis, ventral side up, on a bright orange background.

S. borealis is different — where P. tepidariorum builds intricate three-dimensional webs and likes to hang suspended in space in the middle of them, borealis hugs corners and surfaces, and builds denser, sheet-like webs. They just have a different lifestyle.

It’s unfortunate that she wouldn’t roll over for me, because she has a lovely white dorsal median stripe on a dark body.

This one is P. tepidariorum, and is just a wee little baby, less than two weeks old…but filling out fast.

You might be able to see wisps of its web, but it just doesn’t show up well on this light blue background. I tried to highlight it by misting the container with water, which is why you see little droplets everywhere.

I’m still taking this new lens on a shakedown, working out effective ways to photograph developing spiders. Today was all about trying to get a feel for where the focus is (spoiler: it’s way out there) and how to position camera and lights and specimen, so nothing exciting to report.

So which background do you like, light or dark?

I’m kind of leaning towards the darker backgrounds, since it brings out the webs they’re on, and a spider is intimately connected to its web. On the other hand, since the goal here is to map pigment development, the lighter background makes that snap a bit more and removes the distractions, at the expense of leaving the subject looking like it’s floating in space.

Both photos are of the same animal, Steatoda triangulosa, a young juvenile that’s about a month and a half old.

I’m tinkering with getting better images of these silly spiders, and my latest attempt is to build a little itty-bitty photographic studio on a benchtop. I can mount light sources and reflectors on the bench, play with backgrounds, and position specimens where I want — they are extremely obliging models, as long as I’m bringing in the whole cardboard frame their webs are structured around, which is a slight limitation, because the space has to be big enough for not just the spiders, but also their whole cage. I’m also putting the camera on a tripod and locking it down — it’s heavy — and just manipulating the airy light spiders to get them in position.

They’re all good girls. As long as I’m not messing with the web, they are quite calm and well-behaved, so I can just leave these venomous spiders out of their cages as long as I want and they don’t try to escape or get aggressive at all, they rest suspended happily while I move gadgets around them. I was also able to get some respectable video out of the set up, too, so you might have that to look forward to, too.

I think I could go for this look.

Javier Rupérez

I just need a recipe for more eyes, and I might be able to pull it off.

(Now imagining going into the local hair salon with this photo, and telling them this is the style I want.)

Arachnologists spend a lot of time staring at spider genitals, since they’re often key to classifying them. I’ve mentioned that I want to work out some taxonomic ignorance of my own, so I’m finding myself trying to do likewise. This morning I was working with my shiny new toy to see if I could resolve the important details with an SLR tricked out with a 100mm macro lens and 65mm of extension tubes. This represents the maximum magnification I can squeeze out of this set up, short of mounting the animals under the microscope, which would give me hella more magnification.

I’d rather not go that route, though, because it requires more manipulation of the animals and I’d rather keep them happy and relaxed. Right now in their cages, they lounge about upside down, all quiet and mellow, their legs spread out and flaunting their genitalia to the sky. I can just pop the lid and zoom in with my camera lens and they’re totally unperturbed and au naturale, exposed and waiting for their close-up. This would also be the case if I encountered them in the wild, where I’m typically not lugging a microscope around with me. The hope is that my camera would have enough oomph to get all the diagnostic details.

Long story short…probably not. I’ll throw in a few photos below the fold, but they aren’t quite good enough to see what I need to see.

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Right now, I’m cash poor (please keep that in mind if you think you can get rich by suing me) — I’m having no trouble paying the mortgage or putting food on the table, so I’m immensely privileged that way, but coming off a half-pay year and with annoying legal expenses, I haven’t been able to buy toys for myself for a while…until now. My rule is that all the gift cards I get from the Amazon Affiliate program are mine to splurge on whatever, and I’ve been saving them up for a few months, so that I can get this: a Tokina at-X 100mm f/2.8 PRO D Macro Lens.

I’ve been doing all my macro photography with a Canon Nifty-Fifty a set of cheap macro extension tubes, which work great on a budget. That was the kit lens on my camera, and the extension tubes were only about $20, so it was an easy intro to macro photography. The setup takes good photos, too. The only catch, I thought, was when you put 65mm of extension tubes on your lens, your working distance plummets to nearly nothing. You’ve got to push that lens right up next to your subject, which isn’t always optimal, so I got myself a big beautiful 100mm macro lens with a true 1:1 image ratio so that I’d have a little more flexibility.

It arrived today, so I allowed a little time to try it out, after finishing all my exam grading.

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