On this day I had planned on waking up for sunrise at Red Rock Coulee. But after shooting and driving for over 19.5 hours and going to bed around 1:30 am, my body was too tired to wake up for my alarms I had set on my phone. I think I finally woke up around 8 to have the sun beating down on me in the car as I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag. So I got up and played fetch with my dog Roxy, gave her some water/food, and ate breakfast. After eating I wandered around the meadows with my macro lens looking at the flowers and insects. I found a spider resting in an unknown plant (to me) and snapped a few photos. With this photo I liked how the plant resembled spider legs, and I composed the shot in the “rule of thirds” to lead the lines of the plant to the spider. When processing this photo, the 3:2 aspect ratio was a little wide and didn’t quite work for my eye. I found that a 5:4 aspect ratio worked best for the way I wanted the photo to look. In this photo it looks like the spider is staring directly at you with 2 eyes that are on top of his head while the others are interested in something else.

“Spider” Red Rock Coulee Natural Area, Alberta.

I explored a little more with my camera and then decided to put it away so I could search for fossils. A man and his two girls had shown up while I was taking photos and I began to talk to the father. He grew up in the area and had often visited as a kid to look for fossils and rocks and said the best time to search was just after a hard rain. So they went off on the south east side of the coulee and I was still exploring the grassy area and making my way down to the north west side. Suddenly I heard the two young girls scream and the father shouted at me to go come to them. I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying from farther away, but as I got closer, he informed me that they had just walked past a rattlesnake coiled up behind a rock. I’ve never seen a snake in the wild so I rushed down and snapped a few photos of it while trying to keep Roxy far enough away. I was trying to take photos while the snake was smelling the air with its tongue, but it was just too hard while holding the camera in one hand and Roxy in the other. Snapped with the 105mm 2.8 Nikkor in sunlight (handheld).

“Snake” Red Rock Coulee Natural Area, Alberta.