Today's photo is not pointless!!!

This, ladies and gentlemen (or my two fans... you know, whoever happens to be out there), is a Goldenrod Spider with its prey on the underside of an erigeron (fleabane) flower. There are two very important things about this picture to me:

1. Its of a spider. Always a good thing.
2. I consider it to be the first actual good photo I've taken with the dSLR.

Yay! Frantic clapping of hands and running around like an excited three-year-old!

I mean, seriously. The focus is good (especially considering that this wasn't with a macro), it's got the bokeh I like when I'm taking photos of invertebrates, and did I mention that it's a spider? One of my favourite spiders (as in, see my profile picture)? With its prey? Come on. Even those of you who don't like spiders have to admit that's cool, right?

This, of course, is the cropped and edited version of the shot. Not too edited, though. It didn't need much (again, yay!). For most of the pictures I take the routine is shoot, crop, edit, post to blog, delete -- yes, I consider my photos that disposable -- but I've saved an unedited copy of this one in case I want to use it later. That doesn't happen very often, except maybe for photos of things I've taken at work that might be useful for our future brochures.

I learned the hard way to save an unedited copy of my few good photos, by the way. Years ago I'd taken a photo of an unusual ladybird beetle that I'd found in my father's yard, cropped it, posted it on the blog, and... well, in this case hadn't gotten around to deleting it. A little later one of my coworkers brought in the same sort of ladybird in a bug box because she wanted to take a picture of it and send it to someone she knew who might be able to identify it. I told her I already had a picture of that one, we sent it off, and got a very excited e-mail back asking for the highest possible resolution of the photo. Turns out he was in the middle of writing a book on ladybirds, the particular beetle was an Eye-spotted Ladybird, and the picture I'd sent of one sitting on an apple was.. appropriate. The scientific name of the thing is Anatis mali, you see, and mali means apple. He wanted to use the shot in the book. I very ashamedly had to admit that the only copy I had was the square-cropped one I'd sent him.

Sigh.

He used it in the book anyway, though.

That's right; technically I'm a published photographer. To me, that's one of the funniest things ever. The published pointless photographer.

I got a good picture yesterday, though. Maybe someone would like to publish it?