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Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I took some pictures of bees today.

I used to use a special lens attachment for macro photography that I had to be very close to my subject with, but it broke. It was hard because I had to be terribly still and precise to keep in focus. Then I used a zoom, which I had to be kind of far away for, and then could zoom in a lot, but not as much as I wanted. Now I use my phone which has a great close up camera on it, but I have to be practically touching the subject with my lens again. 

But today's bumble bees did not mind!

These were some nice bumblebees!

Just for fun today I will show you first two unaltered, unedited images of the bumblebees. Actually, they all got mixed up, so I'm only pretty sure these are the unedited ones:

And then here are some more worked up versions of my bee pictures (mostly involving color saturation, clarity, and resolution):

The impossible season

As we know I have been struggling to quintessentially photograph Autumn.

The results have been mixed. I have no ur-Autumn photographs. Nothing has captured the spirit of the season. Not leaf pictures, not squirrel with nut pictures, not stream through the leaves pictures, not colorful tree pictures, not even pictures of pumpkins!

So I gave up.

And once I gave up it suddenly occurred to me: it's not like I was out taking pictures of Summer, or Spring. Don't you think it's a little unfair to have to take a portrait of Fall?

Fall cannot be captured by mortal devices!

So today I went out and just took pictures, and that seemed to work out okay, because I like taking pictures.

Here's some.

You can pretend it's whatever time of year you want:

 

Unexplained phenomenon

Surely the Internet would be more intrigued if I had compelling photos suggesting extraterrestrial intelligence is visiting our planet, or perhaps yet more evidence of the deep corruption in our police forces and city government. But, perhaps fortunately, the Internet doesn't spend much time here at clerkmanifesto. And you who are here instead are just as likely to be captivated by smaller mysteries.  Tiny mysteries. A mystery on a bee!



But let's step back just a bit for a moment.




There I was processing my day's photos. There were the usual scant few good ones and the mostly not good ones. 


Here is my favorite from that day:

Also in that series of photos were a bunch of shots of a honey bee. They all turned out pretty blurry. Hoping that maybe one of them could be punched up into a nice enough photo (it couldn't) I noticed something peculiar.


Here, let me show you the picture (warning: lots of unretouched blurry pictures of bees coming up):

Right. 

So maybe if you look closely at this picture you will think "What is he trying to indicate with the white circle on the bee's right wing?" 



When I noticed that white circle I thought "Is that white circle on the screen of my computer?"



It didn't wipe off. So I looked at another picture:

There it was again. But since I couldn't exactly remember where the circle was in the last picture I now wondered if something was on the lens of my camera. 

But none of my other pictures not of the bee had this white circle.


So I looked at all the other blurry bee pictures:

 Okay, so it is definitely on the bee's wing. A strange white circle.

I took the clearest shot I had of the bee and sharpened it up (as well as I could):

Then I zoomed:

And I zoomed:

And I zoomed:

And I still had nothing.

Although I will say that in the super close up view of the inside of the white circle on the bee's wing, if you look very carefully, it looks a lot like a UFO sitting in a field in the woods.

I hope the cops don't find it.

What it takes to fly

As a person more drawn to a dark view sometimes, or, as we like to call it over here, "realism", I am especially happy to be able to report some happy news from out in the gardens and fields, from nature.

Lately in all my pictures and in looking closely at all the flying animals living around me, I have noticed that flying isn't too hard. Chunks of feather are lost from beaten wings of birds, but they flit on through the skies like nothing much is wrong. Bee wings wear away to almost being stubs, and they zip around in the air nevertheless.






Here, look at this:

Because this bee looks a bit like a stuffed animal bee (cute, fluffy!), or even a dead or asleep bee, I have to attest that I saw this very bee, half wingless! fly away with my own eyes!









And while I've yet to achieve the ability to take even rudimentary pictures of birds in flight, let alone ones missing chunks of feathers,  I do have a butterfly picture around here.  I followed this one to its landing on a flower only to notice the handicap it carried that clearly was not one at all:

I'm just saying:



It's good news. I take the lesson and carry on.

Bugs

Warning: This post includes PG-13 pictures of bugs. Or possibly NC-17 pictures of bugs, depending on your feelings on the matter of

Warning: The next phrase of this sentence will be PG-13 or possibly G-rated depending on your personal views of nature and the unsparing details of how it works.

animal procreation.

Most of the pictures coming up though will be the most innocent possible nature pictures. Of course this depends upon how you feel about bugs and alarmingly up close views of the natural world.

So while I have never given an MPAA Rating to one of my posts before, today I am assigning this one a G to NC-17 rating, depending on your proclivities, for:

1. Animal procreation

2. Possibly frightening images of bugs just hanging out harming no one.

3. Weird eyes.

I'm just saying, one of my co-workers told me she couldn't sleep so looked at my blog and was freaked out by a squirrel staring right into her soul! This could be the kind of thing that could happen to you today!

But it probably won't. Alas.

Shall we begin?

We have recently discussed my historical wariness as regard to bees. 

And in it we advanced the idea that photographing them has made me more comfortable around them. I pester them with my photographing until they get slightly irritated at which point I apologize profusely and all is forgiven.

This system works surprisingly well for me, and modestly well for the bees. They told me so.


Something similar is happening with bugs.

Historically I can be a little averse to bugs. And if some wee, innocent (or not particularly innocent creature) lands on me I have been known to leap into swatting, cavorting, gesticulating, brushing, gyrating action. Generally the bug leaves the area and everything in a seven foot radius around me is destroyed.

But now, in my journeys, I go looking for bugs. I don't have the luxury of destroying the world around me. It would ruin my pictures. Sometimes even mosquitoes land on me and I don't whack them; I am in the middle of photographing and can't be disturbed.

I have a few more mosquito bites than normal for this time of year.

A few days ago a gorgeous, radiant blue dragonfly landed on my hand on my camera when I was on the bluff over the Mississippi River. Instead of flinging my hand out and hurling my camera in alarm I just thought:

"Wow, this is lovely. But how will I photograph it?"

I did not figure out the answer to this. But here are a few pictures of the black and white dragonfly that I see a lot in the library swamp:

I really love the almost rough wing decorations.

I suppose dragonflies and butterflies and even bees would be the low hanging fruit of slightly bug-phobic insect photography. It would be hard for even a person such as myself to get the willies from a picture of a moth wing like this:

Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on what MPAA rating applied to you in the preamble warning section of this essay), I have progressed further along than the exotic beauties of the flying insect kingdom.

I don't know if I'll ever dare to photograph a spider. And I saw an earwig the other day that after a brief moment of consideration I decided to take a pass on (have you ever seen a mass of earwigs spill out of something?). But while I started photographing with only the uniquely colorful beetle miscellaneous type bugs, I have since become open to almost anything:

Like this brown and black slightly spiky sort of fellow:

Or this complicated two-layered construction:

Fairly speaking, this one below has a touch of the rainbow to him, but he is also quite... buggy, if you know what I mean.

I think you know what I mean.

This one below is also a bit in the colorful category, but maybe it makes my point a little; up close they all get pretty interesting anyway, colorful or not, though a lot of the time even the not colorful ones are full of interesting colors, and the colorful ones are still... insects.

This fascinating character is more patterns and strangeness than any notable color.

This, coming up, outside of the lovely backdrop color, is more or less completely colorless, but it's hard to imagine it alarming even someone vastly more bug phobic than myself.

Although admittedly it is always hard to fully imagine and understand the depth of the phobias of others. 

It is a dragonfly, and the so picturesque and often dazzling dragonfly does have its horrifying elements from the right perspective. While this one below does not particularly disturb me, I can at least easily see how it would:

So as we approach our last picture what I'm saying is that in all these photographs I've been taking of insects, when I really look, and tap into all my fears and wonder, my love and hate, my itchiness and freedom, I think there are a lot of places where I can see something in two ways: 

Beautiful and ugly.






When there's a choice, a real choice, I'm trying to choose beautiful.