We were in the middle of summer, and so as I do various things for business and pleasure sitting in my living room and working at my laptop I glance out at my deck and occasionally notice something out in the sunny day. Usually it's birds, but on this day it was bugs, first one or two flies that were staying on the deck rail, then I noticed a little spider hanging out in a corner on its web.

My Canon 5D was the closest and had the 24-105 lens attached and because I wanted to be quick before the fly left I grabbed it and took some shots, the first set of images. Then I got my Canon 1D Mk III -- it had the 100-400mm lens with a 1.4x TeleConverter already on it, and I put it on my tripod and set it up at right about the Minimum Focus Distance, which is 1.8 meters, alost 6 feet, and started shooting with that setup.

Then I noticed the spider, and tried some shots with that. The problem with the spider was that there was a breeze blowing it around so most of my shots were blurry, but oh well.

And then I decided to grab my Canon 30D and put my 100mm Macro lens on it and try to get close enough to get some more interesting shots. This also struggled with the breeze and so got a bunch of failures, but some came out OK. I got two sets, the last two sets on this page, from two different positions, the last the closest and most difficult...such is life!

It should be noted that both of these critters were small all these shots had to be cropped very small, pretty much to the closest crop that would make a decent size image (100% crops).