On the prowl
We were hiking back to the car after a morning spent photographing mostly flowers. Often when heading back I’m a bit tired and perhaps less likely to bring up the camera for just anything. But that doesn’t stop me from practicing awareness of what’s around me, which helped me notice that small movement on the trail just in front of me, a movement that led me to a small wolf spider.
As with so many other forms of wildlife, spiders can be very skittish, disappearing if you move too quickly or get too close. But they can also sometimes be very patient, or at least appear to be as we maneuver our cameras ever closer, testing the limits of the spider’s patience.
To bring the viewer down to the perspective of the spider I set the camera on the trail, using the ground as a tripod to get a little more stability. Then I attempted to get the spider in focus, made a few shots, and tried moving just a bit closer. I repeated this a couple times, letting me create the images you see here. But shortly after this a large group of people walked by on the trail and that was enough for the spider which disappeared before I knew it had moved.
When I returned home I attempted to identify the spider. Looking through some webpages about spiders in Virginia I settled on a species of wolf spider called Tigrosa georgicola. I’m not an expert, so I may be mistaken, and if so feel free to correct me in the comments below. I always like learning new things about nature and wildlife.
A wolf spider on the trail
Tech Talk
If you’re curious about the technical details, I was hand-holding the camera, though as I mentioned I rested it on the ground for stability. I had on my 105mm macro lens which does a great job with these subjects. The trees shaded the trail enough I had to raise the ISO to 1600 to keep the shutter speed around 1/200 to 1/250 of a second using an aperture of f/5 to f/6.3. It’s always a compromise with these types of shots. Stopping down the aperture more would give more depth of field but at a slower shutter speed or higher ISO. In this situation I likely could have used a slower shutter speed but was mostly acting instinctively so didn’t think of trying it.
And speaking of depth of field, I didn’t shoot with this in mind, but I’d created enough images of each pose with slightly different focus points that I brought them all into Photoshop and focus stacked them, giving me just a bit more depth of field on the spider. If I hadn’t been acting instinctively and had thought it through a bit more I might have intentionally shifted the focus while the spider was still and been able to create a final image with the spider fully in focus. But that wasn’t to be this time around. I think I need to practice that technique more often in the field, then perhaps I might think of it when I switch into instinctive mode. In this case, though, I knew the group was right behind me and I didn’t have long to photograph the spider, so I was happy my instincts were enough to create the images I did.
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