Still there!

 I knew they would be there.  Or, at least I hoped they would.  You never know when the mowers will come again.  I had only a few minutes to spare on my way to work.  I was too excited to notice that my fuel gauge light went on.  I decided in advance that I would only look for aesthetic possibilities and not seek information per se.  I wanted my viewers to see what I saw, not a modified version.  Thus, I didn't alter color. 

 The beetle really is that red, and the sky really was that blue.  Colors in nature that a lot of people never get to see.  I know that growing up on the East Coast, I never saw skies that blue.  And, I dont remember ever seeing an insect that red. 

 I focused on what was close, and with the large aperture, that throws the background out of focus.  That's the way we see.  I've never cared for scenic photos with a huge depth of field as our eye cannot see the close-up flower and the distant cliff simultaneously focused.  In fact, it's a good eye exercise to get in front of such a scene and alternately focus on the near and the far. 

 The other thing I did was crop.  That's similar to what the eye sees merely by moving closer or further away.  The most radical difference between what you see here and what you would have seen if you were with me is the fact that our eyes do not see scenes with rectangular borders.  Our field of vision is closer to two overlapping circles, more sharply focused toward the centers.  And, with our stereoscopic vision we can voluntarily choose the point of greatest focus, near or far.

 Being a curious person with a science background, I couldn't help but start wondering about information.  Questions rattled around in my mind.  Answers to many of them might exist somewhere in libraries or in the world wide web.  But I won't look for answers that way, at least not for a long while.  It's too much fun to keep returning to the scene and watching more and more carefully, always remembering to take in the beauty and experience the wonder.

 But those ever-wandering antennae must be doing something.  Are they sampling the air for the essence of the flowers?  Are they choosing a spot on which to dine, or mate, or lay eggs?  Since I saw them mating last week, I figured that some might be choosing a place to lay their eggs.   How well do they see?  Maybe their world is mainly olfactory.  Dogs could relate to that!  I know they live their entire life cycle in and on milkweeds.  So far, I've only seen them on this particular species, the Showy Milkweed, Asclepias speciosa.  But they can be provoked to fly.  Is that what they do when their host plant dies of old age or gets mowed?  Do they ever fight for a mate?  When I find myself

straying too far from the aesthetic and too deeply into information gathering, I always take a deep sniff of the flowers before moving on.  Showy Milkweed is one of the most amazing fragrances out there.