The Dance of Life

Photography is one of my passions. Like many avocations, you get out of it what you put into it. Modern digital technology provides the means to create photo images of extraordinary esthetic appeal. 

I shoot with a Canon 7D, a camera with amazing capability. Anyway, we had sunflowers in our front yard last summer. One day, I noticed the worker bees that were visiting those flowers regularly.  I pulled out the camera and started taking pictures. In this case, a nugget would be an image with a bee perfectly positioned on one of the flowers. Capturing such an image is more a matter of luck than anything else, since bees are always on a mission, and they aren't into primping and posing.

The image below came out of that spontaneous photo session in my front yard. I cropped it to the shape you see, then I processed it in Photoshop and applied an artistic filter to make it more like a painting than a photo. 

I've taken between 15 and 20 thousand photos over the past few years. This one is my personal favorite. I find it to be a wonderful window into the complexity and beauty of nature. The flower is bursting with pollen and nectar. The worker bee arrives and does its little dance, loading up on pollen and nectar in the process.  At the same time, the marvelous little insect is also dropping off pollen from other sunflowers, a critical fertilization step that leads to seed and the potential for the next season of sunflowers.  The worker returns to the hive loaded down with its precious cargo of nectar, essential food for the queen and the next generation of busy little bees.

This kind of symbiosis is an ecstatic truth, open and visible to all who care to notice. It is part of nature's wondrous dance of life that we all depend on, but too often fail to see.

click on image to enlarge