Of spiders and experiments

Have you ever gotten completely freaked out over something you are doing to yourself? Because it is totally possible that I am simply not very bright.

In theory, I am in love with my new super macro photography lens. I am completely confident that once I figure out how to functionally use it that it will make a lot of fun and amazing things possible. In actuality? The struggle is real.

This week I discovered a tiny little spider hanging in the middle of the room in my basement. I am terribly afraid of spiders and will freak out completely if taken by surprise by one, but I also find them fascinating, so I am usually willing to chase after them with my camera as long as my logical brain is in the forefront. Therefore I decided to try out my new camera lens.

I have zero photos to show of that attempt. You know why? Because every time I finally got the spider in focus it was HUGE in the viewer screen, and had the effect of popping out of no where to my emotional brain. At which point I would scare myself silly, leap back, and completely ruin the focus, requiring me to start over. Repeat. Then repeat again. For over a half hour before deciding that perhaps I should figure out how to use my lens on something that doesn’t scare me senseless first.

There is a reason I use this as my self-portrait.

I do realize that I am basically billions of times larger than the spider. Logic and reality only take you so far.

My last week or two have been primarily devoted to experimentation. Given the resist drama of my apple branch I am exploring potential other options. I am learning lots, but it doesn’t translate to pretty pictures.

I did also suffer some rather wild urges to attempt composing bad poetry and subjecting everyone to the results, but you will be grateful to know that I refrained.

However, I also stumbled across an old box of embossing powders from when I went through a stamping phase 20 years ago, and decided to see if I couldn’t do something interesting with them. Just looking at them there is clearly a lot of issues, but they are the test pieces, and I think that they might make an interesting medium to work with in the future now that I have an idea of their limitations. I don’t know if you can see it very well from the scans, but the texture they produce has got serious potential.

The irony of this? The spider is my favorite.

😉