While in LA I got a chance to do a little bit of photography and I have a couple things to post about it.

First off kids are cool. While photographing a flower in front of Kevin's Grandma Kitty's house two girls on bikes stopped to talk to me. They wanted to know why I was photographing the flower. One girl asked "Are you taking pictures so you can find out more about it?"

What could I answer? It was a valid question. With all the photography I do, especially of flowers, you would think I would know something about them. Or at least their names. However I am woefully uninformed in this area. Photography takes up a huge amount of my time, I rarely have time for research. I think sometime in the future I should have a contest of some sort, get other people to tell me things about the flowers and such in my pictures. What do you think?

Second, bugs are not so cool. Well actually they are, they are incredible to look at and can be quite beautiful. In photographing flowers I find that I also photograph bugs quite often. Ants, dragonflies, butterflies, moths, etc.

The bug that bugs me though is the spider. I'm fascinated by them, they are beautiful and at the same time I find them creepy. Now I'm not as bad as Ron Wesley (Harry Potter), and have no dreams about spiders wearing roller skates, but something about all of those legs gives me the heebie geebies.

I'm fine just looking at them if I'm not too near them. The only animals that seems to spook me on sight are snakes. But to photograph a spider with the marco lens I have to get pretty close. The closer I get the more I start to feel things crawling on my arms and legs or any exposed skin.

That and sometimes I will place the camera close to the web and then look into it to focus second. I do this so I don't accidently hit the web with my lens. By doing things this way the magnified size of the spider suddenly jumps out at you as you focus. There is glass between me and the spider but its still startling. Even looking at the pictures afterwards I can sometimes get the chills.

No one was awake Tuesday morning (at about 6am) when I was having my heebie jeebies and I figured Kevin wouldn't appreciate being woken up to guard me against spiders. So I pulled layers of clothing over my PJs and found Kevin's shoes that covered my feet completely. It was my spider armor. I was still spooked but I didn't have the crawly itchy feeling quite so often. Its that whole silly "the covers will protect me from the things in the dark" phenomenon.

Yeah, I know I'm silly... but really, who needs all those legs?