Thanks everyone for responding. Yes, I we call this spider the kruisspin (Cross spider) here in the Netherlands. You are correct, it was facing down, so I should rotate it 90 degrees. I'll rotate it and crop it to make it symmetrical. It was moving out of the center of the frame all the time because the wind had an input, The spider itself sticks to the center of the web, and I notes it had its claws on the web trying to feel a movement caused by a fly or so. It helped me to use the flash to take out unsharpness of movement, but I had to dial in 3 stops of correction to stop overexposing. I am not really pleased by the flash result myself either. It was a lot harder to get it sharp without the flash and also have enough DOF.
On Thursday 07 October 2004 23:09, The Diabolical Dr Z wrote: FJW> FJW> >Fred wrote: FJW> > FJW> >Any arachnologists amongst us who can tell us more about this critter ??? FJW> FJW> I'm not exactly an arachnologist, but FWIW, in both your and Frits' case it FJW> is likely to be female Araneus diadematicus (Dutch name translates to FJW> "Cross Spider", in North America -well, not in Mexico, probably- it's known FJW> as the Garden Orb Weaver). The species occurs on both sides of the big pond FJW> and in apparently equally common here and over there, although there are FJW> some related species that resemble it. I'm not too familiar with North FJW> American species, so it might be one of those related ones, although they FJW> are less common than this one. Big beasts, completely harmless so you can FJW> get really close, they sit still, are nicely patterned... good macro subjects. FJW> FJW> FWIW, Frits, I also much prefer the daylight one. Beautifully lit and each FJW> hair visible. But: the orientation of the spider seems a bit odd to me. Was FJW> it sitting like this, or hanging head-down? That is their typical FJW> behaviour, and therefore the current position strikes me as weird, FJW> especially since the stretched legs seem to be in an odd position for a FJW> spider hanging sideways. But it may just be my imagination based on the FJW> prejudice that spiders are supposed to sit head-down ;-). FJW> FJW> Also, as I admitted earlier, I'm completely crap at composition, but for FJW> some reason it seems to me like this would be one of those rare cases in FJW> which the composition of the image would improve by putting the spider's FJW> longitudinal body axis dead straight in the center of the frame. The spider FJW> is sitting (or hanging ;-)) so beautifully symmetrically (each leg is held FJW> as the exact mirror image of the opposite leg) that it almost asks for FJW> being framed completely symmetrically, especially because it fills up most FJW> of the frame already. It might have been another matter if the FJW> magnification had been less, so more of the web could have been visible. FJW> At any rate, I'd be curious to see what the picture looks like if you FJW> rotate the picture about 90 deg CCW and then crop it a bit to center the FJW> spider. FJW> FJW> Z. FJW> FJW> FJW> FJW> -- Frits W�thrich
