A world in a drop of resin

Click for more detail and greater sharpness.

Yesterday you saw a large ant that was happily free, but I also referred to a post featuring two small ants that met their demise when they became entombed in a drop of sunflower resin. Because I photographed the free ant way back on August 3 of last year, I decided to look through my archives to see what else I might have taken pictures of on that outing along Bull Creek. It turns out that another bit of resin, this time curiously shaped and positioned, had figured prominently in that August 3 session. As you see here, the drop was at the very tip of one of the sunflower’s long and still partly green bracts.

From my vantage point beneath the resin drop, the larger portion of it looked to me like a miniature globe of a planet with brown landmasses and blue seas—except that the blue was from the sky and the brown was from the drying bracts of the sunflower. Because the resin drop acted as a lens, the positions of things were reversed, with the brown mass at the top of the tiny globe coming from the earth-bound sunflower, and the blue beneath the brown “continent” coming from the clear sky overhead. There are likewise regions of blue and brown in the portion of the drop that extends downward, and if you’d like to see all these details more clearly, click on the icon below for an enlargement:

Of the roughly 250 photographs that have appeared in these pages so far, the last two have been among those with the smallest amount of area in focus. Yesterday it was just the ant and a part of the bract it was on; today only the resin is clearly focused, and that’s most likely what your eyes were first drawn to.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

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