What the drizzle revealed
Click for greater clarity.
The morning of March 8th was drizzly, and the idea popped into my head that I might be able to go back to the site in Great Hills Park where I worked the previous day and get some pictures of white prickly poppy leaves, this time with raindrops on them. I did take a few photographs along those lines, but I quickly became more intrigued by the dozens of spiderwebs that the drizzle had temporarily made visible. Predominantly horizontal and close to the ground, those webs had presumably been laid out by funnel web spiders; I made that inference because sometimes I could clearly see the funnel near an edge of the web, though none is visible in this case.
© 2013 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 
Neat!
melissabluefineart
March 28, 2013 at 9:12 AM
That’s how I felt, too.
Steve Schwartzman
March 28, 2013 at 9:26 AM
Fantastic. At first glance, I thought this was a photo of some kind of marine life.
mrsdaffodil
March 28, 2013 at 11:05 AM
I’ve noticed that the same pattern can appear in different realms of nature, so I’m not surprised that this might remind you of marine life. The drops of water serve as an entrée into that wet world.
Steve Schwartzman
March 28, 2013 at 11:12 AM
WOW! I thought this was my photo at first. Yours a poppy leaf and mine a spider web. Love it! Look at the middle photo and the similarities here. http://frommyelectronicfilm.wordpress.com/macro/
Jerry
March 28, 2013 at 12:44 PM
I see the strong similarity to the second photograph in your link. Actually mine shows a spiderweb, too. I’d originally gone to the site to see if the drizzle that morning had ornamented the white prickly poppy leaves in a photogenic way. They had, but not nearly as much as they had the dozens of spiderwebs I found. So we were both drawn to the same subject, one that it would be hard for a nature photographer not to want to photograph.
Steve Schwartzman
March 28, 2013 at 1:28 PM
EXACTLY!!!! However, I will never wait on mother nature again…I have a spray bottle with water. You get the size of water dropplets you desire by the amount of water you spray. 😉
Jerry
March 28, 2013 at 1:30 PM
I linked to one of your other posts in my comment this morning – might that link have landed me in your spam file?
shoreacres
March 28, 2013 at 5:41 PM
I just checked my spam folder and found only spam there, so I’m sorry to say that your comment this morning seems to have disappeared into cyberspace. I’m afraid we’ve all occasionally been victims of the vagaries of the Internet.
Steve Schwartzman
March 28, 2013 at 8:27 PM
Abstract patterns of air bubbles frozen in a red bucket: https://adabrowka.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/you-cant-tell-from-far/
Andrzej Dąbrówka
March 29, 2013 at 2:10 PM
Those of you who live in cold climates get to play with ice and snow. In the warmer temperatures of central Texas I have to make do with water in its liquid form.
Steve Schwartzman
March 29, 2013 at 2:20 PM
Such a terrific shot. The funnel web spider was new to me (no surprise). Looked up some images on the Internet that do show the funnel. Interesting.
Susan Scheid
March 29, 2013 at 7:14 PM
Thanks. I’m glad to have funneled your interest to something new.
Last summer I posted a picture that showed a funnel web spider inside its funnel:
https://portraitsofwildflowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/arachnid-life-and-death/
Steve Schwartzman
March 29, 2013 at 7:24 PM
Duly, and gladly, funneled–quite a shot, with that exoskeleton in the bargain.
Susan Scheid
March 29, 2013 at 7:28 PM
Gorgeous – like bubble wrap or little beings.
The World Is My Cuttlefish
April 1, 2013 at 4:51 AM
I would never have thought of bubble wrap, maybe because I’ve never seen any wet. As for little beings, there almost certainly are some in the darkness of the off-screen funnels.
Steve Schwartzman
April 1, 2013 at 8:12 AM