Jumping Spiders are a favorite subject of mine. I believe this little one is a female Eris militaris, though I'm no expert. The shot was taken in northern California on a small purple artichoke. I didn't have a ton of light and I was taking the shot hand held, so I used a 400 ISO, which is pretty much admitting that I was going to have to shrink the resulting image a bit to get rid of graininess. If you click the image, you can zoom in. I reduced the image size by a third after some raw processing for sharpness and noise, and I'm pretty happy with the results for a hand held, existing light (bright shade) shot. The colors are awesome and there is a lot of potential composition to work with. I cropped some off of the bottom, but I think this could be framed a lot of different ways and still work. Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi Lens: EF-S60mm f/2.8 Macro USM Shutter Speed: 1/160 ISO: 400 Aperture: Av 5.6 Post Processing: Edited in RAW for sharpness and grain, cropped and reduced image size by a third.

I was outside on a sunny day and found a Red Back Jumping Spider hunting flies along the top of a brick wall. These little guys are curious and have excellent vision. I've found they have little fear of people, unless you make sudden moves or loom too much. This is one of those spiders that with its red and black coloration immediately sends the ignorant packing with fears of black widows, which of course resemble these only in color. It would be like confusing a cow with a zebra. I've handled dozens of these and have only been bitten once (by a pregnant female).  It made my finger a little numb for an hour or so but I had no other side effects at all. This one was nearly full grown, and was curious enough about me to come right up to the edge of the wall and slaver for the camera. If you look in her eyes you can see my reflection, as well as the wall beneath her feet. Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi Lens: EF-S60mm f/2.8 Macro USM Shutter Speed: 1/200 ISO: 100 Aperture: 4.5 Post Processing: A  contrast boost, a bit of sharpen. Cropped it for composition.

I admit that I don't know what species this is. If anyone does, feel free to throw the info into the comments, otherwise I'll get around to looking it up sooner or later. This is one of the very first pictures I took the day I got my 60mm Macro. This spider was standing vertical, as pictured, on a round post just outside my back door. I've seen similar spiders that stand like this on a single stem of tall grass, but with all of their legs together. With a macro shot this close up, it can be hard to get enough depth of field to get focus across the whole subject. The only reason this shot worked so well is that the whole spider is parallel to the plane of focus. Planning for this is one of the biggest keys of good macro photography. I took the shot hand-held, but braced against the beam. If I were to do it again, I would likely boost the ISO to 400 in order to give myself room to boost the depth of field a couple more notches. Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi Lens: EF-S60mm f/2.8 Macro USM Shutter Speed: 1/250 ISO: 100 Aperture: 5.6 Post Processing: Just a bit ...