The first time, the impression I got was that it had just teleported out of the frame; figuring that wasn’t really likely, I started looking on the floor (it had been on a doorframe) and was lucky enough to catch sight of it clinging to the side of the lens as my eyes swept floorward. The second time I guessed where it had gone and thus found it more quickly.

Then I found out how difficult it is for somebody not already a spider expert to use Google to identify a spider! (For the whole first day I searched, the only spiders I found online that were the right shape were also an order of magnitute larger than the one in my bedroom. I finally found a picture described as “probably genus Metacyrba” that looked similar and was the right size.) Or perhaps my Google-fu is merely weak. (I was looking for a dichotomous key that started with gross, obvious to casual non-expert viewers, features instead of starting with how the mouth moved.)

The spider appeared to be at least as annoyed by the flash as it was by the proximity of the lens (my working distance was a few centimeters with a 1:1 macro lens). I’m not used to photographing macro subjects so eager to get away, nor so agile. Shooting vegetation is much easier. Especially without a ring-flash.

But as a side effect, I’ve learned more about jumping spiders lately, and education is always a good thing.

My poor-quality photos before the wee beastie made good its escape:
complaining blog post — http://dglenn.livejournal.com/1146944.html
next day — http://www.kempt.net/~glenn/photos/Spider20080609.jpg
(It’s two to four millimeters across in its usual standing pose.)

And somebody else’s photo of a similar spider (though the frontmost legs are different): http://bugguide.net/node/view/61552

Then the camera probably would have hit a tree.

“Hey WTF is this? And where’d my snack go?? Darnit, prey’s gettin’ harder and harder to catch these days….”