The Coast is Clear

Sometimes I’m amazed at how much mileage I can get out of the magnolia tree. Whenever I need some inspiration for a photograph, I just look around at one of these oddities and soon enough, as Henry Jones once said, “The solution presents itself.” I was certainly not expecting to get a picture of a bee mid-flight here, but I do like how it turned out. The only thing I’m not happy with, and that I will continue working towards, is how the bee is ever so slightly obscured by the flower petal. It would be awesome to get a picture of a bee hovering right by a flower, and one day I’ll get it, but for now this is probably the best bee picture I can recall taking. The thing about those little suckers is they won’t stay in one place and generally respond quite poorly to my humble requests to do so. A nice telephoto lens might have made this picture a little easier, since due to the limitations of my 50mm lens I had to stand about 2 feet away and hope the bees did not sting me. But the nice part is I got a cool closeup view of some magnificent flowers which, much to my surprise, had wilted the very next day.