Robert Bruce Moment

I just though I'd start off with a post about something that amazed me.

If you are arachnophobic, look away NOW!

The trap is laid; the hunter waits patiently.

I never thought I would ever say this but I was amazed by this spider. I've been observing it for the last few days. It appears out of nowhere almost like part of a magical performance everyday around 6:15 p.m. and starts working on this elaborate and massive web. The web itself is surprisingly large, given the spider's tiny size.

It weaves it across three different trees that are about 4 meters away from each other. This in itself is an amazing feat. I have no idea how it gets across these trees, then again I don't know much about spiders.

The first time I saw the spider I took a silhouette of it against a street lamp. I shared the following image a couple of days back on Google+ and Facebook.

When I saw it again yesterday I just knew I had to try and capture the spider ad its web. It was late when I finally got down to taking pictures as I had to wait for everyone to leave and then lock the gates. The people here think anyone with a camera is weird. They just stare and stare and stare until you feel so uncomfortable that you can't wait to get away from their gaze. So I let the dog loose (a real watch dog) and got my tripod out and set it up.

I didn't expect to get good pictures because I don't think the Canon SX50 HS is the best for night photography. I expected focusing to be a real pain. I was wrong. Surprisingly auto focus worked well - thanks to the AF Assist Beam. 90% of the time it focused right where I wanted it to. Of course I had to use the on camera flash due to lack of a better option. One great thing about the SX50 is that you can shoot RAW which made the task massively easy.

Waiting. Watching...

While taking the shot part of me expected the spider to get mad and come down from its web and bite me. Another part of my mind was on the dog that kept running past me at full speed. I was worried he would knock the camera over. Thankfully that didn't happen. Yet another part was thinking how great it would be to get Spiderman's powers :D

At one point the spider suddenly moved and I literally jumped when I should have run away. Turns out it wasn't interested in me but rather in a strand of webbing that the wind had broken.

To make matters worse (seems like there are always things that do) the mosquitoes really wanted my oh-so-sweet blood. I'm guessing it was sweet since I had eaten a few pieces of cake prior to this photo shoot.

I was pretty satisfied with the pictures that I managed to get. I also managed to get quite a few mosquito bites but that's something I can ignore...for now.

I'm waiting for the spider to come out again tonight. If it does I'll be waiting to shoot it...with a camera, that is.

This somehow reminded me of Robert Bruce (hence the title of this post).

For all these shots I just set the camera to Aperture Priority mode.
For the shots where you can actually see the web, I used the on-camera flash.

I'm sorry if the pictures spooked some of you. I do hope this doesn't stop you from viewing my future posts. Don't worry there will be very few pictures of spiders...if any. :)

Take care.