Macro Photography By Thomas Shahan

“There’s another Scotty dog,” his grandmother would say, and sure enough, there it would go scooting up the wall in jerky little leaps. "Sometimes we’d see one on the screen door, a moth in its mouth. It looked like a diner startled in the act of wiping his mouth on a folded napkin. These 'dogs' were jumping spiders. With their big eyes and fangs that dangled like mustaches, they looked like tiny terriers. As a kid fascinated with bugs, I stared at a lot of jumping spiders. Recently, though, I came closer to them than I ever had before."
It was Shahan’s page on the photo-hosting website Flickr that brought pictures face to face with this eerily beautiful animal. But Shahan didn’t stop with one jumping spider. Oklahoma is home to at least forty kinds, and Shahan is on a mission to photograph them all, each in astounding close-ups.
“How one of the most beautiful and interesting groups of animals on the planet can go unrecognized and unappreciated is beyond me,” he says.