Tag Archives: macro photography

Photos of the Week – May 21, 2025

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I’m already missing my square meter plot and that whole project, but I’m soldiering on and finding other fun photographic opportunities. It’s been fun to watch the growing season jump into full speed, despite really dry conditions. We’ve gotten some good rain across much of the state this last week or so, but most of the state is still in drought conditions. It’s a good thing prairies are so resilient!

Here are a few of my favorite photos from the last few weeks.

The first several photos below were taken within my 2025 photo project area at my family prairie. Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) was going to seed earlier this month and I spent part of a pleasant morning admiring the interplay between the light and those fuzzy seedheads.

Tiny crab spiderling on pussytoes.
Close-up of pussytoes seed head.
Morning light and pussytoes seeds.
More of the same.
Early morning at the Helzer Family Prairie, with coralberry, aka buckbrush (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus) in the foreground. This was not in my photo project area.

The rest of these photos were taken at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies. The first two come from a wetland restoration effort I led many years ago. We converted a sandpit lake (from sand and gravel dredging) to a shallow wetland with backwater wetlands and a meandering stream. It’s still one of the most gratifying projects I’ve worked on, despite a constant flow of invasive plants coming in from upstream.

Evening light at a restored wetland.
A four-eyed bullfrog staring at me from the wetland I designed. They’re technically invasive here, but since they’re here and there’s not much I can do about it, I can at least appreciate their funny faces.
Ladybug pupa. There were a bunch of these around last week. I don’t know what species they are.

As the sun dropped into haze-filled horizon one evening, I played around with various subjects to put in front of that sun. Here are two of my favorites.

Prairie ragwort (Packera plattensis) and the setting sun.
Long-jawed orbweaver on its web.

I think all of our migratory grassland birds have arrived back in our Platte River Prairies. At least some dragonflies seem to be here, and I’ve heard people are starting to see monarchs in eastern Nebraska, though I’ve not seen my first yet. Temperatures are rising and summer is on the way!

Photo of the Week – November 10, 2018

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A goatsbeard (Tragopogon dubius) seed hanging on the flower stalk of hoary vervain (Verbena stricta).  Lincoln Creek Prairie, Aurora, Nebraska.

Despite being a little slow to fully embrace it a dozen years or so ago, I’ve become very grateful for the world of digital photography.  One of the best perks, of course, is that it costs nothing but sorting time and storage space to take lots and lots of photos.  When I was shooting slide film, I was very selective about how many photos I took because I knew it cost me about 33 cents each time I clicked the shutter.  As a result, I didn’t take as many chances as I would have liked, and often didn’t take enough images of a particular subject to get what I really wanted.  

Today, I don’t mind taking way more photos of something than I think I’ll need to make sure I’m happy with the final result.  A great example of the benefits of this strategy occurred back in June of this year.  I had finished spending some time at my square meter photo plot, and was doing a quick meander through the rest of the nearby prairie when I spotted a goatsbeard seed that had gotten caught on the flowers of a hoary vervain plant.  I liked the color and texture the seed/flower combination, so I stopped to photograph it.

The seed was barely attached to the flower in one place, and a gentle breeze caused the seed to slowly rotate around on that fulcrum.  In my head, I had only a vague concept of the image I was trying to capture.  There was something about the fuzzy, webby texture of the seed and the strong vertical arrangement of the flower stalk, but…  As the seed shifted around, I just snapped away – kind of like trying to refine an idea by just talking it out.

Just when I was starting to get frustrated by not getting what I wanted, the breeze picked up just for a second and blew the seed into a new position, where it hung for a few moments.  That was it!  I slid my tripod a few inches closer and got exactly the shot I had been searching for the whole time.  It’s become one of my favorite photos from this year, both because of its simple beauty and because I had to wait for it to happen.

This is definitely the image that captured the essence of what attracted me to the tiny scene in the first place.