On Wednesday morning, I was out at the Platte River Prairies early to harvest seed, but all the vegetation wet enough I decided to hold off until the sun got a little higher and dried things out. I had to fill time somehow, so I grabbed my camera and wandered a little. You know – just to fill time. Here are some of the photos from that walk. Have a great weekend, everyone!

As the sun started to rise, I played around with silhouettes of big bluestem flowers in front of it. After taking the above photo, I found a scene I liked and tried out versions of the image from slightly different angles and with various amounts of depth of field. That always seems like a good idea at the time, but I pay for it later when I have to try to decide which I like best. In this case, I could only narrow the field to three, and decided to keep and share all three.

Once the sun was higher and brighter, I stopped playing with backlit grasses and put my macro lens on. The plains sunflowers (Helianthus petiolaris) were loaded with caterpillars, as they often are, including some that were the exact yellow color of the ray flowers. I also spent way too much time face to face with a robber fly that seemed cold and wet enough to tolerate my presence as the sun rose behind it. Then, as I wandered back to the truck to start harvesting seed I got distracted several more times and gave in to temptation. I did eventually get a bunch of seed harvested too…