Wildflowers Up Close

I've always loved taking pictures. When I got a iPod with a camera feature, this love went a little insane. I discovered all kinds of cool editing software, and gave in to temptation to take a huge amount of pictures and spend a huge amount of time fooling around with them. Then---disaster struck. The camera stopped working. I need to take it back to the store. It's still under warranty. However, I haven't gotten around to that yet. I was driven by desperation to start using my regular camera, which I thought that after the excitement of Camera Awesome and Hipstamatic and all the fancy stuff would feel boring. I was poking around my camera settings to try to find something flashy, playing around with a scene mode, and put the camera on close-up. I took a few pictures of assorted flowers in my back yard, uploaded them and found I loved what I saw. Not that I took any earth-shattering pictures, but just being able to look at the wildflowers close up was much more interesting than I had ever dreamt. Somehow they have a lot more detail than I imagined! Somehow, being into games like The Sims, I had started thinking that details have a limit---that if you zoom in very close to things, they start to lose pixels and aren't as complex. I knew this wasn't true, of course, but I didn't really BELIEVE it wasn't true. But wow---flowers are incredibly detailed. So I have decided to try to get a good close-up picture of every new wildflower that pokes up in my back yard this year, and some of the other plants too. And insects---I've gotten some butterflies and regular flies. I won't share the flies pictures---well, not unless someone really BEGS---because they are a little gross, but fascinating, too. But here's a few of the flower pictures, chosen at random!