Ant undaunted

Click for greater clarity.

Oh profligate me: I take a lot more pictures than I can possibly show you here. Now that we’re in a relatively bleak part of the year, I’ll supplement current pictures—which aren’t coming quite as fast and furious, thanks to the season—with some from the past year that I never managed to squeeze in, of which there are many.

Back on August 7th I showed a photograph of two ants that met their demise when they became entombed in a drop of sunflower resin. Most ants, especially the bigger ones, don’t suffer that fate. Here’s a large reddish one I photographed on the tip of a sunflower leaf alongside Bull Creek on August 3 (on the same outing that produced the picture of the bald cypress “rainbow”). Ants often move quickly on plants, as this one was doing; if that’s not the way the photograph makes it look, it’s because I used a shutter speed of 1/500 sec. to stop most of the motion. Even so, you can see a bit of movement in the ends of the ant’s antennae and its forelegs.

For those interested in photography as a craft, points 1, 2, 5, 7, and 18 in About My Techniques are relevant to today’s picture.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman