Saturday, September 5, 2020

Spiders of September

 

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As I was sitting out back just now I noticed this orb-weaver spider in her web spanning part of the width of a basement door that rarely gets opened. I went upstairs to get my camera and brought along a water mister to spray on her web, but the mist didn't really stick. Maybe the strands of the web are just too thin to hold decent sized droplets.

I also remembered to look up the reason why it seems like I see more spider webs in the garden in the late summer and early fall, and the answer was that the females that hatched in spring have finally gotten big enough to notice. The smaller males are roaming the earth in search of females, who will lay their eggs before winter sets in.

And since I already had my camera out, I decided to clean the sensor since I've been putting it off for some time. I put it off because no one has invented a tiny vacuum cleaner or some other easy and effective method of doing the job. It always takes several iterations of snapping a picture of the sky with my 50mm lens stopped down to f/16, then importing the image into Lightroom so I can see where the spots are. Sometimes I'll do the cleaning, only to check the sensor and find it even more spotty than before I cleaned it, which never makes me happy. What does make me happy is when I somehow finally get the thing in good shape.

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