Parade of water lilies and dragonflies

At the Frank Schwartz gardens Saturday, on an outing with the CNPA, I found a good variety of plants and insects to photograph. I'll start this installment with an ultra-wide angle view from just a few inches above a pond.

I was hoping to get some good photo ops with dragonflies, but they didn't become active until later in the morning, so I began by shooting various flowers.

Pac-Man has a lot of freckles.

I did not use a polarizer for this next shot. Rather, at a particular angle the blue sky reflected intensely and other areas of water were clear enough to show the bottom.

Note the effect of the slightly different perspective between the next two images.

Then some bees began to appear. This little one entered a composition I had set up showing two entire flowers, and this is cropped from that shot, so it's not as crisp as I might have liked. I like the colors and the composition though (even if I do say so myself).

At last, a dragonfly actually lit on a colorful flower!

Sometimes two is a crowd. These bees were feeding off the same two flowers, when one bee came in for a landing almost on top of the other.

Coming up are the kinds of twigs and high perches that the dragons seem to favor.

The following image of two flowers in a dark pool of water is my personal favorite of the outing.

Here's another lily in a nice setting.

There was a mass of (frog's?) eggs covering a lily pad and extending into the water. They are held together by a gelatinous matrix that proved to be a dangerous trap for a hapless dragonfly.

A good samaritan tried to rescue the dragonfly, but I fear it was doomed.

To close, a hybrid of two color varieties.

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