A quick break from the dive trip photos today to share a spider shot.

So I have this obsessive-compulsive behavior when I eat an apple - the first thing I do is to remove the stem. I don't know why, I just do. Anyway, I went to eat an apple I had packed in my lunch, and I noticed a web in the spot where the stem comes out. So I gently remove the stem, and low and behold, there is a small jumping spider that had been living in the web.

Somehow he had survived multiple days in the refrigerator living on that apple, and as a coworker pointed out... of all the millions of apples in the world, that spider managed to pick the right one to decide to hang out on. Not only did he not get squished (which I am sure would have been the reaction most people would have had), he got save in a container, taken home, given his own photo-shoot, and then released into a house plant to be able to stay warm and hopefully survive the winter.

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro, 1/200 sec at f/16. Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX in ETTL mode. ISO 100. RAW processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

Hopefully that doesn't put anyone off from eating apples - out of the hundreds and hundreds of apples I've eaten in my lifetime, this really is the first time I've ever had a spider on one. And yes, this photo is staged... since I wanted to finish my lunch and I had kind of destroyed the web already by removing the stem, I had to put the spider on a different apple once I got home.

- Bill