On Friday the 29th of April, I was feeling a bit photographic in the evening, but twilight had already arrived and so the possibilities didn't seem good. But then I remembered that I actually own a flash unit, and I hadn't really ever experimented much with the thing to figure out how to make it do what I wanted to do.

So I dug out my flash and went looking for subjects. I left my macro lens on the camera, because it had been so much fun the last time I was out. I eventually found three subjects, and experimented with different flash placements and different camera settings on each of them. Here I'll show you my best effort with each subject.

The first was a flower pod of some sort, growing in the courtyard outside of my place. It was one or two centimeters across...the size of a cherry. The flash helped to emphasize the little hairs that covered it.

Subject number two was an Orb Weaver, which in this case means a spider in the family Araneidae. There are hundreds of species of Orb Weavers in North America, and none of my guides go into detail about how to distinguish between them.

However, I did just discover that there are only 94 species of Orb Weavers that are native to Canada and Alaska, and that there is a guide book for them that is published by the Canadian government. I've ordered the book from the library at work, and once I get it I'll see if I can name this beast.

In the meantime, though, we can all appreciate the detail of how its eight hairy little legs are arranged, and the camouflage color patterns on its abdomen.

Stamina, of course, is the plural of stamen (both in English and in Latin), and in this case it refers to those six little green/yellow things coming up around the pistil (the big green thing in the middle). Stamen in Latin means warp or thread, and is the root of both this use of stamina and the more common use of it, where it means endurance.

Okay, I'll confess. I could've also said stamens instead of stamina. Either is acceptable as the plural of stamen in English. But I like stamina better.

Not near the end of my stamina,
Tom