Having had a couple highly successful, extended photo trips in recent weeks, I stuck close to home this past weekend. In fact, I stuck within a hundred feet or so on Sunday. Certainly that gave me time to get caught up on yardwork and mundane tasks but I did whip out the camera a bit.

While sitting on the back patio enjoying coffee in the cool morning air with my bride, these two insects caught my attention.

We routinely see dragonflies but it isn’t often they land long enough for me to get a picture. This one was quite pretty and colorful – and seemed to be sporting a smile. Then, a rather large moth made an appearance. It had some cool orange coloring when flying but I was never able to get pics that showed much of that. However, I did get some nice closeups, including some with it extending its proboscis (tongue).

This will probably illicit some, “Oh, gross!” type comments but it is kind of neat. I spotted these two (look close) spiders on the side of our house recently.

Initially they were separate and I was photographing the bigger of the two. Suddenly, the big one lept at the second and, well, it was clear its intentions were less than kind.

Yeah, definitely a bit of ick-factor to the shots but also kind of cool. 😉

So here is your chance to laugh at me.

This cool dude was hanging out on one of our patio chairs just a bit ago. I ran inside, grabbed my camera, mounted my macro lens and came out and started snapping pics. I was squatting down with the end of my lens hood was only five or six inches from the spider and I don’t think it liked that because it jumped right down the hood!

This is the image I got just as it leaped into the air. That startled me as I was worried the dang thing had landed on me, and I fell backwards, right onto my butt.

My wife, worried I would panic, yells, “Don’t throw that camera!” LOL! I didn’t throw it, thankfully, and gently got it out but, boy, it sure did startle me.  😀 

This is apparently an Apache jumping spider – and clearly it can jump. Kind of a cool looking dude.