Above: Here's a picture of a spider hanging around the B&B we stayed at in Wimberly, TX. 
Update, October 2003: Another Argiope image and more spider pictures from the same B&B in Wimberly:

(Now back to the original story.)  I named him "Boris," which my wife didn't understand as she wasn't really into The Who way back when ;-)  Subsequently I found it really is a "Doris."

Someone asked "How big is that thing?"  One of the links below suggests they get to be 1 and 1/8" across (whatever way across is), but I think this one may have been bigger than that.

Shot details:  This was made possible by equipment sold to me by the members of the Olympus OM camera mailing list! Shot on my OM2s (thanks Tom!), Vivitar 90mm macro (thanks to another list member whose name I forget, sorry), handheld, Kodak RG 100 print film, ~f8 at about 1/250 plus or minus one fstop in either direction.  I was bracketing around "sunny 16."   Scanned on my Nikon Coolscan IV ED & cropped & processed in Photoshop 6.0  True Confessions:  I did jazz up the color saturation a tad (who needs extra-color films when you have Photoshop?)  It really was hand held, leaning against a bush, standing on tippy toes.  Fortunately there was a lot of light which allowed a small fstop for good depth of field as well as a fast shutter speed.  The direct sunlight in this shot nicely highlighted the funny web thing this spider does.  You can't see this in the other shots not taken in direct sun.

The Spider page is now here!
Argiope with Egg Sack
Photo by Paul Rieder, used by permission.

More Info on this type of spider (from U. of Mich, go blue!)       More pictures of this type of spider by others.

Copyright © 1998-2003 Dick Locke.  All Rights Reserved.
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