Posted in Flowers, Insects, Macro Photography, Nature, Photography, tagged Canon 100mm macro lens, Canon 50D, carpenter bee, coneflower, Eastern Carpenter Bee, Echinacea purpurea, Meadowlark Botanical Gardens, purple cone flower, Vienna VA, Xylocopa virginica on August 8, 2014| 8 Comments »
Sometimes, simple compositions of familiar subjects result in the best images, like this recent shot of an Eastern Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa virginica) on a purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea).
It came out just as I imagined when I was looking through the viewfinder of my camera and required a minimum amount of tweaking and no cropping.
At times, it’s not complicated.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Posted in Flowers, Gardening, Humor, Insects, Macro Photography, Nature, Photography, tagged Agapostemon, bee, Canon 50D, cone flower, Echinacea purpurea, green bee, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, metallic green bee, purple cone flower, Richmond VA, Tamron 180mm macro on August 17, 2013| 15 Comments »
I usually think of bees as being yellow and black, but I encountered this cool-looking metallic green bee (of the Agapostemon family) yesterday at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Virginia.
I remember The Green Hornet on television when I was a child, but I had never seen a green bee before. At first I was not even sure that it was a bee, but as I watched it gather pollen, I concluded that it had to be a bee.
It seems appropriate that I would be suffering from color confusion at that moment, because the bee was perched on a Purple Cone Flower (Echinacea purpurea), a flower that in my experience is rarely purple—they normally appear to be more pink than purple.
Now that I have freed my mind and broken the bonds of my conventional thinking about the color of bees, perhaps I will be able to bee all that I can bee.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Posted in Flowers, Gardening, Insects, Nature, Photography, tagged Alexandria VA, bee, bumblebee, Canon 100mm macro lens, Canon Rebel XT, Echinacea purpurea, green spring gardens, purple cone flower on July 6, 2013| 4 Comments »
It doesn’t get much more simple or more beautiful than this—a fuzzy bumblebee on a Purple Cone Flower (Echinacea purpurea).
I got as close as I could with my macro lens, eye-to-eye with the bee, and managed to capture some of the incredible details and colors of both the flower and the bee. Except for a minor amount of cropping and tweaking, this is pretty much what the image looked like when I first pulled it up on my computer.
It’s enjoyable to chase after more exotic creatures and environments to photograph, but it is reassuring to know that beauty is never far away—it is present in the ordinary.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Posted in Flowers, Insects, Nature, Photography, tagged bee, Canon 55-250mm zoom lens, Canon Rebel XT, flowers, purple cone flower, simplicity on July 18, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Yesterday I took this shot of a bee on a purple cone flower.
The subject matter is pretty ordinary; everyone with a camera has probably taken a similar shot. Somehow, though, the different elements of the photo—the colors, the shapes, the background, and even the bee—worked together to create an image that I really like.
What it beauty? In this case, I find beauty in the simplicity of a photo like this one. The photo is not perfect. That does not bother me, however, for my experience has shown me beauty too is rarely flawless.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 