When photographing some plants in Ultra-Violet light in our small car port I noticed there were a couple of spiders on there webs that fluoresced quite nicely. Last night I had a go photographing them.
The first specimen was nice and still. I got the camera set up and correctly focussed with the flashgun ready to illuminate it and I was just about to release the shutter when it suddenly disappeared. A crane-fly had flown into the bottom of the web and the spider dashed off to gets its dinner. I waited for it to wrap its meal but it didn’t stop moving. The flash photos I took were nice and sharp but the ultra-violet ones which took 1-2 seconds showed a lot of movement. Below a show a comparison pair using the best of the UV fluorescence ones (but this still shows motion blur):
This next view shows it getting its jaws into its meal:
As there was too much movement I moved to the second specimen. This was perfectly still and I managed to get the flash image and a first UV fluorescent one. While taking a second UV photo another crane fly flew into this web as well. This second UV image showed some movement blur as the crane fly hit the web towards the end of the exposure. Here are the good shots together in a comparison slider:
I might try again depending on the availability of spiders on their webs!