New Resident in the Garden

When I recently trimmed back one of the bushes in my little garden it turned out I made room for a resident to move in.

I had never seen a spider like this one before. I assume this one is female. She has built a web that I cannot photograph well enough to do it justice. Her web is quite complex and rigged with many lines in all different directions to give it stability.

I went between the bushes and the front of the house and squeezed in to try and get a better picture of her. She knew I was there. There is no sneaking up on her. She made her web vibrate rapidly and she didn't like the lens of my camera being close to her.

Thanks to questions from friends on Facebook I have identified her as one of several species of  golden orb weavers. I used a 75 mm - 300 mm lens, set to the longest focal length and stood on a stool about fifteen feet away from her to get this, and the remaining photographs.

I took the best picture of her and enlarged it and cropped it in an image editor, amazed at the detail I had captured from such a distance away. She's about 7 cm (3¾") from rear leg tip to front leg tip. The yellow on her back is iridescent, something the photograph does not capture.

Update
The following pictures were taken a few days later. She moved to the other side of her web and I took photographs of her underside, and another from the side.