No second chance

A spider can hang, perfectly still, in her web for hours. Days, even. Weeks, if she's guarding an egg sac. But if she decides that the clicky, flashy thing pointing at her is not to her liking, she's gone in an instant. Often one shot at a photo is all you get.

I aimed the camera at a web conveniently hung just where I was likely to run into it, as is the habit of the cross spiders around here. Before I had focused, the spider was at the far end of one of her tethers. I turned and shot, and then she was out of sight.

I'm surprised that the photo turned out ok.

Araneus diadematus, about 1/4 inch long. On sausage vine.

Tentacles!

Still testing shutter priority mode.

The anemones in my aquarium cause me no end of trouble, with their semi-transparent tentacles always in motion, and their habit of picking the most awkward spots to settle in.  I've taken hundreds of photos and deleted almost all of them. A fast shutter definitely helps.

Double lines in Val's tentacles. She often twists them in spirals like this.

A quick shot, with minimal processing; cropping, resizing, white balance is all.

The largest of the Orange Striped Green Anemones, Haliplanella lineata, (What a big name for such small critters!) has a good appetite, and a full crown of tentacles to keep it in groceries. It seems to have eaten something dark, which has left a black mark in the base, invisible in normal circumstances, but not when it's parked on glass.

These anemones have from 60 to 100 tentacles, up to about 2 inches long. This one is getting close to that maximum.

Feeding, this anemone has a pale greenish cream column. The upper half is the same translucent off-white as the tentacles. I was starting to doubt my identification, when in protest against the hot weather and my slowness in providing more ice, it shut down, condensing itself to a half-inch round dark green mass, with the orange stripes it's named for. Chilled and happy once more, the stripes disappeared.

Testing Shutter priority mode

I usually keep my camera set to Auto, and toggle quickly from manual focus to autofocus. Both settings have their advantages; manual focus for face shots on critters that happen to be sitting still, autofocus for their more rambunctious moods. I've tried the aperture priority setting; it works out fine for larger objects, where I want the background to lose detail, but for the unpredictable smaller things, spiders and hermits and the like, it leaves me too often with the whole critter just out of range.

I hadn't tried Shutter priority before; "they" say it's for long exposures with a tripod, or on the other end of the scale, for sports and other fast action photos. And I rarely have opportunity for either.

But how about in macro photography, where the tiny subjects are almost too fast for my shutter finger? For the last few days, I've been experimenting with the fastest shutter speed setting my camera can handle. And I'm happy! I managed to "freeze" some amphipods!

Amphipod hiding in the sea lettuce, tests the current with one antenna, one leg. More legs are visible through the sea lettuce.

Tail end of an amphipod. Their legs stick out in all directions, which makes sense, seeing how they move about; they swim or scramble forward, backward, or sideways, "upside-down" in our terms, or right-side up; it makes no difference to them.

Courting pair, waiting for her (the small one) to be ready to mate. The male appears to be staring down a worm inching its way along the eelgrass. "Scram, or I'll stab you!" he says.

These photos are almost as they came from the camera, except for resizing and adjusting the white balance. I took out a few scratches on the glass, as well.

I had to jack up the ISO to 800, so there's a bit of noise in the darker areas, what with shooting through old glass and moving water. But the colours are truer than at my usual settings, and the flash doesn't produce the awkward highlights that show up at slower speeds. And even a running hermit crab gets his photo taken!

Very small hermit (less than 1/2 inch long) on a barnacled clamshell.

Another tiny one, at a crossroads high in the eelgrass.

Tentacles, tomorrow.