Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Having worked for 72 hours last week and most of the weekend so far, it was good to take a couple of breaks. Saturday I went for a bike ride with the youth through the bush near here. After losing the slow riders early on the fast bunch went hard for an hour or so. I followed that up with hanging with our kids for a bit. We had some great laughs just hanging out. Today I went to church briefly (after a few hours sleep – didn’t stop to talk sorry) and came back home to work. At 4 PM I had finished a major piece of work and decided to take the kids to the park. We went to the lake and I have that story below. I actually ended up being there for 2.5 hours and took over 400 photos while I was there. All the good ones have been uploaded into Flickr in a couple of different sets. All the photos I uploaded are in the 20081130 lakewalk set. I also uploaded large versions of the close ups, mostly of birds, but also of the girls, into the Close Ups set. There are some really nice black and white shots of the girls there.

After playing in the playground for starters, we went exploring – Mercedes was the leader today. First we went out onto the bridge over the lake and looked at ducks, turtles, fish, dragonflies and lilies. I have been teaching them the value of sitting still and looking at what you can see sometimes. It is amazing what is right under your feet!

Before this spider was sacrificed to the fish, I took the opportunity to do some close up macro photos. I love the way you can see the hairs on its legs so clearly. This spider was in our bathroom and around 120 mm across. More shots up on Flickr

We had a thunderstorm last night. I was driving home watching it advance from the west and wishing I had my camera as there were awesome lightning strikes going off every 2-3 seconds. I got home just as it came overhead of our place and rushed out the back to sit under the patio with the camera on a tripod. I got a few good shots but as we were in the middle of it it wasn't as good a looking picture.

Here is one shot. the rest are up on flickr. Some of them have blurry spots where there was water on the lens of the camera.

I am getting better at taking them and hope to get some really good ones some day.

Check out this cute little spider that hit my desktop this morning when Jude brought it round to me. I got a couple of good photos of it but it wouldn’t sit still until i got it out onto a tree.

Anybody know what sort of spidy it is?