This Space for Rent

The quick brown spider catches more flies.


Zoooom goes the teeny tiny spider.

When I went downstairs to pour myself a cup of tea this morning, I caught something moving fast out of the corner of my eye. It turned out to be the kitchen spider weaving a brand new web at top speed. When I first saw it, it was spinning the ribs of the web, but by the time I went out into the front room to grab the Pentax, change to the telephoto lense, and come back it had finished with those and was running around and around the web, weaving the sticky bugcatching lines. This web might actually be better at catching things, because some of the structural strands are attached to the basket of fruit that half of the flies in our house are hovering around (the other half of the flies in our house are part of the ongoing plague of grain moths that are infesting Portland; When we started having infestations of grain moths, I thought it was just us, but I've seen grain moths in city busses, at work, in bookstores, and at the places where I get art supplies, so I don't think it's the malign shadow of our housekeeping that's bringing them out.)

One flaw in the Pentax *istDS's firmware is that it gets very slow about doing autofocus when there's not a lot of light around. And my autofocussing skills depend on my eyes being able to focus, which is not a given before I've had a cup of tea in the morning. The spider was inconsiderately moving fast enough so that autofocus was not even a remote possibility, so I had to rely on my eyes working. Which they sort of did, if you disregard my continuing inability to deal with things like depth of field.

Comments


great pictures. a good look at a small world. depth of field is sometimes tough.

i got here from, hmmm how did i? well, i arrived at your complaint about mark morford. that may not be his most thoughtful essay, though i think he was aiming at an attitude more that exhorting anyone to be irresponsible, but i do appreciate his passionate, gushing waterfall of words.

dread pirate roberts Sat Jul 23 19:36:55 2005

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