Beauty In The Beast

To avoid giving you to oogly wooglies (I think I made that up), I'll just post a thumbnail of the spider. I wrote up a bit about this critter on my flickr site which you can click through the image to see. One of the things I talked about was I've spent many hours editing the photo, to clean up the background. I'm not yet done to my satisfaction, at least not for the additional uses I may put the image to later.

These are pretty common. During that week or two when Fall is getting started I usually see one a year inside the house. You only have to discover one in your bath towel once in your lifetime to encourage you to check during the months around that short period they tend to come inside while they adapt to the weather change. Both my brother and I have experienced that, though thankfully in my case it was before I started drying off. In any case they are little creepy when they are life size, and with this macro shot it more than fills the monitor when zooming in for touch up. So, I only worked on the image for relatively short periods of time, so I wouldn't be visited in my dreams.

All that work editing the photo had a surprising result. I got past the nearly automatic revulsion and started seeing the beauty in this arachnid. Not something I expected. I think there is a lot of the little boy surviving in me, as I still think spiders a cool because they can scare the bejeesus out of me. Now I think they are lovely as well. (I'd like to get a good close up of one of the really little black and white jumping spiders which come out when the weather gets nicer.)