Tag: spider’s web

Read More

Suspended Spider

I love spiders. What can I say? No one can ever accuse me of killing one, unless by accident—and my rescues of nearly drowned or crushed spiders is legendary in the arachnid community. These eight-leggers know who is their human friend.

So I am surprised to discover the Featured Image, languishing unpublished. Yeah, yeah, the awards-givers won’t be banging on my door, holding trophies immortalizing this shot. But, hey, the thing looks suspended in air, and the photo is excellent smartphone showcase of past capabilities:;10 years ago (almost)—Oct. 11, 2014, using iPhone 6.

Read More

Rest in Peace, Santa

There is moaning and wailing at the North Pool tonight. Who will drive the sleigh and deliver presents to all the good boys and girls (if there are any) on Christmas Eve? Santa somehow got himself tangled in a sticky web and a spider sucked all the fluids and organs out of his body. Chris Kringle is crumpled.

I used Leica Q2 to capture the tragic Featured Image today. Vitals, aperture manually set: f/5.6, ISO 100, 1/640 sec, 28mm; 9:37 a.m. PST. My wife and I came upon Santa’s remains in the Campus-North perpendicular alley that is parallel to Meade in San Diego neighborhood University Heights.

Read More

Tangled Web

Belated topic time: Few months ago, I changed copyright on this blogsite and my Flickr from a Creative Commons non-commercial variant to All Rights Reserved. I did this in response to so-called artificial intelligence algorithms scraping content from websites for various purposes—improving learning models being one of them.

Some of that content can and likely will be repurposed for profit and in manner outside my artistic control. Software developers, many of them large tech companies—think Apple, Google, and Microsoft, for starters—can claim plausible deniability. “Hey, we didn’t know that would happen”.

Read More

Hey, Spider

Six years ago in October, I photographed a stunning sunset spider using Google Nexus S smartphone. On July 17, 2017, at 7:16 p.m., another opportunity came—and I felt bad for the arachnid.The nighttime web attached to bush and parked car. If the owner(s) were to go out…

I shot several portraits with Leica Q, using dedicated Macro mode, and also iPhone 7 Plus. The digital camera delivered better than the smartphone—not that the Apple device did poorly. The Featured Image is a close crop from the original using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I shoot in DNG (Leica’s chosen RAW format) and convert to JPEG. Vitals: f/2.8, ISO 100, 1/80 sec, 28mm.