Peacock Spider

After I had managed to get photographs of the male display of Maratus volans, the hunt for better pictures was on. I spent hours each day and  the pile of leaves on the dining room table became a permanent fixture, to the annoyance of my family. When dinner was ready we all had to huddle around the half of the table that wasn’t occupied by leaf litter. Even though my family had gotten used to my various obsessions over the years, they weren’t quite prepared for this one, and still seemed puzzled by it. My wife regularly asked me whether I hadn’t taken enough pictures yet and why I wanted to take more.  

Once I had accumulated some shots I was reasonably happy with, I wanted to show these to people, and perhaps even make a bit of money from them. At the time I hadn’t even heard of facebook. Social media was in its infancy, and I had no interest in it. I remember hearing people talking about myspace and seeing more and more looking at their phones, but neither did I understand what they were talking about nor what they were doing. In Townsville I had started to use a commercial photo library called ANT. They were marketing my wildlife photographs but I found dealing with them increasingly frustrating. I explored other options and found Photographersdirect, an online market place where I could upload photographs myself and license them directly to customers without a middleman. Of course they took their cut but it seemed a good system, and I was ready to upload my batch of peacock spider pics. 

There was a serious setback though I had to deal with. My external “Lacie” hard drive on which I had stored all of my photographs crashed, literally. It fell off the table, while I was editing some photographs and my entire photolibrary vanished in an instant. I hadn’t made any backups, trusting the sturdy looking metal box. This was a disaster equivalent to the house burning down. I engaged a firm offering data recovery but had to wait weeks for diagnosis, a very long wait. Their rates were steep too, I was looking at $2000 at a minimum, if they could restore the drive, and the emphasis was on IF. I was prepared to spend that money, but was eventually told there was no chance, the damage was too great. Probably one of the saddest days in my life. Luckily I could recover many of my earlier family photographs from an old drive. But my peacock spider photographs were not among those. They were gone, at least the original high res ones. What remained were lower resolution previews that my photo editing software had saved on my internal hard drive. Much smaller in size they weren’t as good, but they had to do from now on. I still get requests from publishers for these pictures, and every time I get reminded of those sad days. I learned my lesson, backing up is essential.

Whatever I had left of my pictures I uploaded on Photographersdirect and shared the link with a couple of people that I knew had an interest in spiders, including my Dutch friend Ed Niuwenhuys. He had just visited Australia and had produced a fabulous website on Australian spiders. We had been in touch regularly for some time. I had been using his site for identifying spiders and I had sent him my photographs to include on his site. My new photographs of the male Maratus volans display he uploaded attracted a lot of attention. The word was out now, and more and more people took note. The responses I received confirmed that I had photographed something extraordinary. I wasn’t the only one who got excited.

In November 2009 I was contacted by a UK Based news agency who had seen my peacock spider photographs on Ed’s site and wanted to write stories for national newspapers in England. At the time my response was muted and it took a while to convince me. I was worried about people violating my copyright and stealing my pictures, possibly even making money from them. Eventually I obliged and not long after articles appeared in the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. Seeing my name and pictures there was quite something, I didn’t regret my decision. Ed Nieuwenhuys noticed increased traffic on his website following these articles, so clearly the world became interested in this spider and what I was doing.