1201_1292 Spider On River Ice
There's been very little wildlife to photograph this winter: extreme cold has kept most species lying low, except during the few days of midwinter thaw last week. So... searching my files for older shots made in winter, I've come up with a set of seasonally appropriate critter shots, some of which caught me by surprise. This spider, for example.
I'm not 100% certain, but I think it's a grass spider or funnel web spider; we have a lot of those on the northern prairie. The odd part is that I didn't expect to see one crossing the river on the ice in January! But there it was.
The day had started cold, -20°C, but then quickly warmed to -5. Still, how does a spider function at -5? And why would it crawl out of the protective leaf litter and set off on an expedition in midwinter? Whatever the answer, I was pleased that it stopped and posed nicely for me before continuing on its bizarre and probably ill-fated journey. I used the tripod and 105mm macro + 1.4x teleconverter for this, and did not manipulate the background, which was a thin layer of plain white snow on river ice.
Uploaded to Flickr ten years ago, now removed and replaced with this newly processed version: larger, with better contrast, but retaining the high key look of the original.
Photographed on the frozen Frenchman River in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission ©2012 James R. Page - all rights reserved.
1201_1292 Spider On River Ice
There's been very little wildlife to photograph this winter: extreme cold has kept most species lying low, except during the few days of midwinter thaw last week. So... searching my files for older shots made in winter, I've come up with a set of seasonally appropriate critter shots, some of which caught me by surprise. This spider, for example.
I'm not 100% certain, but I think it's a grass spider or funnel web spider; we have a lot of those on the northern prairie. The odd part is that I didn't expect to see one crossing the river on the ice in January! But there it was.
The day had started cold, -20°C, but then quickly warmed to -5. Still, how does a spider function at -5? And why would it crawl out of the protective leaf litter and set off on an expedition in midwinter? Whatever the answer, I was pleased that it stopped and posed nicely for me before continuing on its bizarre and probably ill-fated journey. I used the tripod and 105mm macro + 1.4x teleconverter for this, and did not manipulate the background, which was a thin layer of plain white snow on river ice.
Uploaded to Flickr ten years ago, now removed and replaced with this newly processed version: larger, with better contrast, but retaining the high key look of the original.
Photographed on the frozen Frenchman River in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission ©2012 James R. Page - all rights reserved.