{"id":1744,"date":"2018-05-16T08:07:48","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T13:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itsallmalarkey.com\/staging\/?p=1744"},"modified":"2020-03-16T11:25:59","modified_gmt":"2020-03-16T16:25:59","slug":"of-spiders-and-experiments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itsallmalarkey.com\/staging\/2018\/05\/16\/of-spiders-and-experiments\/","title":{"rendered":"Of spiders and experiments"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I have zero photos to show of that attempt. You know why? Because every time I finally<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

There is a reason I use this as my self-portrait.<\/p>\n

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I do realize that I am basically billions of times larger than the spider. Logic and reality only take you so far.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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The irony of this? The spider is my favorite.<\/p>\n

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