Getting close and blowing up

When I first started with digital photography I took lots of random photos and then was amazed what I had snapped when I saw the pictures on the bigger screen of my computer.

The bloom of a dandelion, generally considered a weed, was one of the first real revelations: the little curlycues on the stamen completely surprised me.

I kept getting close to insects and flowers and kept being surprised. I had seen macros of butterflies before but now I could take them myself.

Look at those lightbulbs at the end of his antennae!

The crisp colours are amazing, the blue sky, the almond blossoms, and the striking butterfly.

The textures in this shot astonished me – the translucent wings, the hairy legs, but most of all the pleats of a dry maize leaf.

Seeing the pollen basket on the legs of a bee was wonderful.

Same shot, I thought – but now the big screen revealed something else. It explained why the corbicula had looked a bit different, kind of dry. The bee was dead, caught by a crab spider which had been hiding in the lavender. Who knew that such dramas happened in my garden!

And then I was astonished by a photo bombing bee when trying to get close to a green-veined white (possibly).

The resulting photo – though not perfect by any means – was well worth keeping.

And finally, what astonishes me are simply the colours I find occasionally (next to the charming scene of a butterfly at cocktail hour).

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: What astonishes you?

7 thoughts on “Getting close and blowing up

    1. I have this ongoing argument with a friend who takes analog photos. She insists that she choses her subject much more carefully, has to make a much more conscious decision on what photo to take, which angle to apply, the lighting, the shutter speed, etc. I agree that it might make her single shot more valuable (to her) but I’m not good enough a photographer – I like to take more than one photo, feeling my way, and learning like that.

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      1. Someone in our photo club – quite a young man – uses exclusively analogue. It’s an expensive pursuit (film and developing), but it really suits his slow, thoughtful choice of subject matte and his images have quite a different ‘feel’ and look from the rest of us. I’d love to give it a go, and maybe I will one day.

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      2. My “analogue friend” is also a lot younger than me. But I know it will never be for me even though I dabbled with developing films myself (only monochrome) when I was in school (we had a dark room for that purpose in our school).

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