Photo Finish 31: I Spy a Bee

Hey there everyone, how was your week? I’m looking forward to this weekend. We get to go awaaaay! That’s pretty much almost always a treat right? I hope you have some treats in store too. But first…photo finish Friday is here.

And as promised I saved one from last week’s cutting room floor. Not that this one took second place, but I had intended to make a sunflower picture so I felt like that’s the one I needed to post last week. And some of you were inspired by the sunny colours and big blue sky too so that makes me happy. Insert happy dance here.

But like I said the path I walked to get to the sunflowers had this dry sunny roadside stretch of wildflowers and weeds. And the way the sun was shining through to create this backlit haziness…well it made for the exact kind of scene that I really love to shoot. And so I stopped and took literally one photograph, and this was it.

do you spy a bee?

This is what I love love love about photography. That the camera sees things we don’t notice. That it freezes a moment we missed while we were right there. That bee is shockingly in focus. I was almost tempted to crop it right down and have only a bee photo except that would not be pretty. At all. But that lonely bee adds a dimension of life and purpose to a photo that was pretty enough but now it’s interesting too…don’t you think?

Fun fact:

So the plants in this photo (which I mistakenly called thistles last week) are actually called teasel or teazle. Have you ever seen them before? Apparently they are more common in Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean than here in Ontario. The brush-like flower-heads have been used since Roman times to brush the texture back into wool and cloth. An infusion of the root was said to strengthen the stomach and create an appetite…

(uh, no thanks)

…anyways…also cleanse the liver and treat jaundice. So there you go. You can read more cool stuff about it here.

And now you have something fascinating and intellectual to discuss at the dinner table. And the next time you see these weeds don’t call them thistles like I did. And watch out for bees.

Happy Friday, friends!