2BD32 Autumn Copper Revisited in a Spider's Web

 Exported from Picassa.  It's a little lighter than the LightRoom version below.

Exported from LightRoom with deeper contrasts.

I wasn't quite happy with the barn pictures yesterday.  They seemed kind of flat, lacking an inner glow that many other of my classmates achieved with Kim's autumn copper presets, so I gave it another go thinking I needed a more appropriate base picture.  This spiderweb was it!

The Original Photo in my front yard. 

This spider web was underneath our mailbox.  

The Recipe
Background image of spiderweb.
In LightRoom5 : Kim Klassen's Barely Color Preset (to de-saturate)
                            Kim Klassen's Autumn Copper Preset
                            Crop Image
In PhotoShop Elements 10 : Add Text : Abbyline Font with Orange Glass and Regal Gold Layer Styles applied at 74% opacity.

                            
Notes : Yes, I'd say this was a much better choice for Kim's Autumn Copper preset.
Also a good idea to use the Barely Color preset first, which made a clean slate for the colors of the copper preset to work.  That might have been a good idea for the barn pics yesterday to tone down the reds and greens. 


Ever since I took this picture (Yes, spiderwebs are on my list of images to capture whenever I see them), I've been looking for the perfect quote to go along with it.  I have a few that I've been saving up, but they just didn't feel right with this image.    Back when I was in Library School many years ago, I remember someone came to give a talk on spiders and weaving and how that tied in with all the myths and stories about spiders.  It was a fascinating hour of mind-mapping and brainstorming.  I wish I had taken notes that day--or if I had, I have long since misplaced them.  Everything from Arachne and weaving fate, destiny and spinning silk/gold to black widow spiders and Anansi and Inktomi and the world wide web.    So many meanings ...  Spider webs and the web of life ...     After a Google search for spiderweb quotes, I wasn't finding anything that captured what I was looking for.  So today I sat down and did a mind-map to try to recapture some of those ideas from that old lecture :

Then I took a nap and came up with "Dream Weaver."  My One-Word for 2014 is Dream (Need I say more?)

There are some decent websites out there that log the symbolism of spiders and spider webs, too :
Wikipedia's   Cultural Depictions of Spiders
A Seeker's Thoughts on Interconnectedness 

The part that really has me fascinated from the Wikipedia article is the bit about Indra's net ...
I'm pretty sure I'll be doing something with this image in future ...  I love finding inspiration in unlikely places!

“	Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops.	”
— Alan Watts , Following The Middle Way[36]

In the Vedic philosophy of India, the spider is depicted as hiding the ultimate reality with the veils of illusion.^[37] The Vedic god Indra is referred to as Śakra in Buddhism, or with the title Devānām Indra. Indra's net is used as a metaphor for the Buddhist concept of interpenetration, which holds that all phenomena are intimately connected. Indra's net has a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels.^[38]
As related in the book, Vermeer's Hat by historian Timothy Brook:

When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists.^[39]