Light is everything in photography. Without it we wouldn’t have photography. So I watch for changing light and how this affects the scene in front of me. And sometimes I’m amazed by what light and nature create.

My father and I were hiking the Oak Ridge Trail in Prince William Forest Park one morning. As is often the case on these hikes, I wasn’t looking for anything specific to photograph, but instead remaining open to anything we stumbled across. I often travel with just a single lens which limits what I’m able to capture, but that sort of constraint can sometimes be a good thing (as is the lower weight and bulk of my pack!). On this morning I was carrying my 105mm macro lens, so naturally I was drawn to smaller subjects.

One thing that’s hard to overlook during early morning hikes are all the various spider webs (sometimes crossing right over the trail, so watch out!). It really is amazing just how many spiders are out there. We saw so many webs, each different, and from a wide variety of spider species.

Then we rounded a corner and noticed how the light was hitting this one special web, creating such beautiful scintillations, colors and shapes just twinkling and sparkling. It was like looking through one of those old kaleidoscopic tubes, twisting it and watching the colors and shapes swirling and changing.

I quickly pulled up my camera and tried to capture some of this incredible sight. I was hand-holding and it was early enough that this part of the forest was still fairly shaded. Thankfully there wasn’t a lot of wind, so the spider and its web weren’t moving too much, but I still needed to raise the ISO to between 1000 - 1600 to give me a shutter speed of between 1/80 to 1/320 of a second. I have a bit of a shake to my arms so it wasn’t a perfect situation and using a tripod would have been better, but sometimes there’s more benefit to the flexibility of not using a tripod.

A couple minutes later the scene had completely changed, all because of the shifting light. I continued photographing the same spider, which I believe to be a filmy dome spider. This time, though, the light was enough to light up just the spider, letting all else fade to black, the web almost invisible, the spider appearing to glow. It makes for a very different image, doesn’t it?

About a minute and a half later, and from a slightly different perspective, I created this final image. This time we can see the web, but with a very different look than the first image. In this one it’s far more simple, a multitude of little threads. I liked how you can see where the spider’s legs touch the web and how they sometimes pull on it just a little. Notice how different the spider looks in this light, too. You get a more detailed view of it, helping with identification.

Any light can be good light for photography. You just need to be open to the possibilities and willing to experiment. Always be aware of the light around you. It can shift and change in so many ways as the sun travels across the sky, clouds move in and out, trees sway back and forth. Spend some time in one location and notice how the light can change and how this affects the scene.

It’s a beautiful world out there!

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