Spiders ‘n webs
Cats: Canada, beauty, photos|Go here to view this set in Flickr.
Early one sunny August morning, I turned off the highway to take a picture of a beautiful still lake. The lake was pretty, but it was in the field next to the lake that I stumbled upon gold.
There were hundreds of spiders’ webs*, their gossamer fibers sparkling with the dew.
It was like entering a fun park with only ferris wheels or walking through a diamond farm. I had to pick my jaw up off the ground and for two or three short seconds, I was speechless. (And this speaks volumes.)
I only had my 17-40 wide angle so photographing these webs meant getting close. Many of these shots were zoom cropped for a close-up view of the dew.
Spiders are fantastic engineers, but I never realized they were such gifted artists too.
If I had to make a top-ten list of the best moments in my life, this would be right up there on that list.
* Keen GT followers will recall some of these pictures from previous incarnation of GT.
April 16th, 2008 at 11:20 am
That’s pretty darned nifty.
April 16th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Beautiful shots GT …. I wonder if spiders drink the dew??
April 16th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
These are the best things I have seen all week. Nay, all month! These quite literally made me joyful. Go spiders (and spider photogs)!
April 16th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Whoa, that is groove-tacular.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I love the beads of water glistening off the webs… great photos GT
April 16th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Beautiful shots GT. I was hoping I could Dick Cheney you in one of those big dewdrops, but photoshop analysis seems to show that they refract the distance, not the reflect the foreground.
April 16th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Admittedly it did take me a minute to stop chuckling from the diamond farm comment, but I have to agree with the others, those pictures are beautiful!
April 16th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Love them Gail!
April 16th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Splotchy, thank you.
Togs, a nice slurp of dew after a good feed of fly? What more can a spider want?
BB, that is how I felt when I saw them, full of joy. I would have been full of doom if I hadn’t brought my camera with me. Now I’m never without it. Well, almost never.
Becks, Whoa, that’s some wordage!
Chance, you can actually see the sun in the dew drops.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
TagBagger, if you had managed to “Dick Cheney” me, you would have failed. It’s just sun reflected in those dew drops. There were no naked women in that field that morning.
Allison, thanks. That’s how it seemed, like a diamond farm with all those glittering drops of dew.
Eva, thank you. Now send me that test I need to take to tell me how old I am in dog years!
April 16th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
I would frame those as a little series if you have the wall space. They’re really lovely!
April 16th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Spiderwebs always freak my children out but I love them. So beautiful! And so industrious, those little spiders.
April 17th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Woah! Tell me GT, do you sell prints? I have my eye on three of those to make a prefect triptic.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:34 am
MdG totally stole my idea.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Did you get rid of the flags? I liked being Canadian…
April 17th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Chelene, thank you, I’m thinking the same thing.
Jacy, they are the worlds’ best little engineers.
MdG, not for sale right now, but you never know. I’ll keep you posted.
Deepti ditto
Deepti 2, I don’t know what happened to the flags. I disabled my Firestats to make some room on MySQL ( didn’t work) and lost the flags in the process.
April 18th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Wow, they’re incredible! Especially that first one… You should win an award or something. Seriously!