Insect photography is always a challenge, but especially when it is windy and the subject moves! While on an afternoon fall walk with my mom, I noticed a leaf blowing in the wind, and I wondered if it had a spider on it. To my delight it did! A spider species I had never seen, I thought it looked like an Orb Weaver, but I didn’t know the species name. It’s a female marbled orb weaver, also called a Pumpkin Spider as it often resembles a pumpkin!
I had the Lensbaby Sol 45 on my camera, as I was wanting the bokeh blade effect with fall leaves. I decided to leave the bokeh blades on while photographing the spider, because it would probably give a good effect (which it did), and the native aperture of the Sol 45 is f/3.5, but if you use the bokeh blades its about f/5, so with the wind and a very small subject the small aperture would be good. Also, since the focusing distance of the Sol 45 is 14 inches, the spider would have been too small on my full frame Canon RP, so I used macro filters I had brought just in case I came across small flowers or insects. I used +4 and +2 macro filters, and focus peaking, which I have on yellow at the moment.
Spider on the leaf, getting blown far from my lens! Photo by Pamela Stoneman
I used ISO 800, which is my “go-to” ISO when photographing insects. I had to move around a lot, first so that the leaf didn’t get blown into my lens, (after all, I wanted to photograph the spider, not have it crawling on my lens ::) ), and because the background was really blown out, and I wanted leaves behind, and the bokeh blades rendered great patterns!
Now the wind blew the spider towards my camera, which is how I got the first photo of it on the leaf! Photo by Pamela Stoneman
Then a large gust of wind blew the leaf away, so the spider was left on its silk line. I hoped it would crawl back down, but it went up first, after the leaf blew away, so I took a photo of it up in the trees with blue sky around it. You can really see just how small it was!
You can see its tiny legs high up in the tree! I was holding my camera far above me for this photo.
Then it crawled down the silk, but the gusts got stronger, so I really moved my camera back and forth and took lots of photos, and aside from the ones where it was blown out of the photo, I got some really pretty ones with nice afternoon light that really show how cool the spider was!
Crawling down the silk line after the leaf was blown away. You can see the pretty patterns it has!
I love the sunlight on it, its so beautiful and feels like an impressionist painting with the background bokeh!
Now it’s crawling back up! It looks like its reaching for the sky!
The Sol 45 with the bokeh blades gives an impressionist look to the photos, very dreamy!
It was over very soon though, because the spider took its silk line up with it into the tree leaves! I love the surprise of finding cool and new insects on a nature walk! Orb Weaver spiders are not poisonous and they are usually brightly colored and or have cool patterns and designs as well! And how awesome is it to find a Pumpkin spider in the fall??!!
Crawling off into a windy fall afternoon! It looks like its hanging onto the bokeh!