Macro Lilies

The other day, I saw some birds drinking from a puddle on the street that had been contaminated with engine coolant and transmission fluid. I spent a moment deciding if I should take a picture or...

Next thing I know, I'm waving my arms, chasing these birds away, and shouting at them, trying to present a threat so that they won't come back. I look up, and see that a small crowd of people has gathered and are watching me, probably trying to figure out why this Asian dude is flipping out. Needless to say, I didn't take the depressing picture and opted to find a way to clean the shit up, for similar reasons I didn't photograph the beaver eating twigs from a stagnant puddle in a filthy garbage ditch a couple months ago. Still, I probably should have taken both pictures.

So, now that I've talked about birds that will inevitably die due to drinking poison, let's talk about something totally unrelated: macro photography and flowers. Happy flowers.

Some say macro photography is not much more than some sort of scientific photographic documentation, some complain about lack of depth of field, and others think it's just plain boring. Well, it's all kind of true. But I still like it. Here are some random handheld flower macros:


To me, this looks like so many different things that I won't even get into it. It's a yellow lily from the shower setup post. Pistil in focus, and pollen covered stamens in the background.


Another perspective.


A pink lily, lacking a pistil. It appears (and mostly is) moderately out of focus on purpose, with a small section of the mid-stamen actually in focus. It gives it somewhat of a color-flaring, underwater feeling. Sometimes it looks like a flower, other times it looks like some sort of sea anemone.