If Escher Were a Spider

It is the time of year when the morning spider webs are just amazing, and if you haven't been out and about looking for them, you've really been missing the show! I stopped along Spring Creek for the first time in a while, and I was so glad I did. There was mist rising off the creek, and the vegetation along the stream was just LOADED with webs.

Big webs. Little webs. Too many webs to count. Webs here, webs there. Webs at all angles, interconnected, overlapping. I spotted what may have been the largest web I've ever seen in my life, easily three feet wide and four feet tall, just hanging from nothing in thin air.

Boy, was I glad I spotted that one BEFORE I walked through it. I mean, I am a spider lover, but . . . EW!!!!! Still, isn't it awesome for the world to have a creature that can create art out of practically nothing, that hangs from nothing, but that is amazingly beautiful.

It can be difficult to capture webs with a camera. Background and light and angles are everything. The morning dew helps, of course. It draws down the light from the sky and makes each spider web look like a shimmering veil of diamonds. So pretty, so fancy, so amazing in their intricate details.

I took a few shots of this set of webs hanging in a tree along Spring Creek. If I showed you the larger shot of this, it would reveal that there are easily at least FIVE webs right in this spot. I chose to focus on the middle three. It reminded me of an Escher print: orderly, complex, amazing; difficult to decipher exactly what was going on, but fascinating to look at, nevertheless!

I wanted the music video that accompanies this to be something visually interesting too. I found a link that purports to list 10 really visually amazing videos. Here's the one I picked: OK Go, The Writing's On the Wall.

It says the video was made in a single take, using a Panasonic Lumix camera mounted on a stabilizing frame, "full of optical illusions and mind trickery." If you enjoyed that, here's another short video they did that's pretty cool too and you can watch it here just for fun: OK Go, The One Moment.