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This probably guarantees my place in the Nerd Hall of Fame on the basis of not only spending so much time with a spider, but then spending so much time making graphic art from a spider.
Out of the series of photos taken of this spider, only 2 of them turned out somewhat ok. This view is looking downwards, and since the spider was clinging upside down from the web, this is the underside.
I was trying to use my Kodak digital camera with two magnifying filters attached, from a range of about 2-3 centimeters away from the subject. Apparently, just a millimeter or so throws off the focus, and on a sunny day its quite difficult to determine the image quality by looking at the LCD because of too much glare.
Once I touched them up in Adobe Photoshop, I couldn't help from trying out some of the filters such as the Stylize > Glowing filter which produced the multicolor effect, and also trying create a green glowing outline that might be used as a desktop background by first desaturating, selecting just the light areas, then adjusting the color balance and hue.
To the best I can determine from my Audubon guide to North American spiders, this is one of the Large Jawed Orb Weavers, perhaps the Venusta Orchard Spider, part of the family Tetragnathidae. The guide says:
These orb weavers are easily recognized by their unusually large, powerful jaws, or chelicerae. Like Orb Weavers, they have 8 eyes, and 3 claws on each foot or tarsus. Many species spin orb webs although in some species only spiderlings produce webs. There are about 25 species in North America
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