Small spider, home

I'm going to begin this edition of the blog with an apology: I should know the identity of this ground-scurrying spider from the eye position alone... but I don't... yet.  I spotted this little guy—actually, it's more likely a female, but I don't know how to tell the sexes apart either... yet...—walking along the leaves in the garden in the almost warm, mid-afternoon sunshine, and fortunately, I was carrying the dSLR with the new 85mm micro attached, so I could continue putting that lens through its paces. So far, a month into owning it, I'm very impressed with its optical quality, and while it's a little bit of a challenge to hand-hold—it's no doubt better when affixed to a tripod, but that makes it pretty cumbersome—I've been able to get a usable shot, well, more often than not. This is certainly a publishable image of a critter about the size of my thumbnail, but, it turns out, I took the picture from the wrong side. Eye placement, I learned while trying to ID the arachnid, is a key field mark, so the next time—and there certainly will be a next time—I'll make sure I'm in front-on portrait mode.