The red hourglass

It's harder than you think to photograph such a small subject.
This is a juvenile female red back spider.
The lens is less than one inch away, and focusing it extremely tight.
Thankfully there is a glass jar between me and her.

Flame

One candle (and one LED - I cheated, to give it a specular high light)
I'm not sure, if I'm done with the candle experiment, as I like the self illumination of the wax of the candle.
This is shot with the 50mm, and I experimented with the various aperture settings to get the right depth of field.
1.8 was way to shallow and basically nothing was in focus. Too much Bokeh can be a bad thing.