Big or tiny, lots of people scare them. Me, I find them fascinating, so small creatures which can be very dangerous and when you take time to look at them you see aliens with several pairs of eyes, a hairy body and long spikes on their legs.

Spiders which belongs to the family of arachnids are in fact arthropods which have 8 legs and a pair of jointed jaws in front of the mouth with a 2 fangs to inject their venom which will paralyse or kill their prey. There are more than 45,000 species which can be found all over the world except in Antartica (you know where to move if you are arachnophobe). Most of spider live 2 years except the tarantulas which can live up to 25 years in captivity.
Spiders are predators, preying on insects and sometimes other spiders. I’ve seen in South-America huge spiders catching and eating birds. Brrrr, scary!
Some spider webs are even used to make silk threads to sew or to make fabric and clothes.

To shoot spiders I use my Sigma 150mm macro lens. Because of the narrow field of view I set the aperture to f/16 or even more and install the lens (which is heavier than the camera body) on my tripod. In some cases I use flashes, my Nikon macro flashes (R1C1) or a set of SB-600 and SB-800 flashes controlled with the SU-800 or my PocketWizards or recently a cheap LED macro flash bought from China (which gives good results).