For the want of better camera skills....

I take a lot of pictures.  Most days, I will snap around eighty to a hundred photographs of everything from the sunrise to the sunset....and all sorts of things in between the two.  I just find nature and life in general quite fascinating and, thus, feel the need to record all that is around me.  There is just too much happening out there in my little portion of the world that a lot of people never see or perhaps never want to see.  Folks are far too involved in this so-called rat race thing that a lot of living is passing by without them ever realizing it.  So, that said, I suppose I have appointed myself the task of photographing everything that I deem worthy of recording...and that is, well...everything.  Life is just far too amazing to ever let any of it just slip by without being observed.  Maybe someday, I will take an earth-shaking picture that will change all of humanity but I seriously doubt it.  I will merely be happy if one of my photographs brings just one smile to one person.  That...would mean that my efforts have been successful.

Yep..all of those white dots were gnats! They sure are hard to photograph!

Today while on our trek around the hillside and down to the end of the pier, Ms. Ezzy and I were engulfed by hoards of gnats.  It seems that the warming of the sun had made them all slap-happy and they were determined to show us just how elated they were to see us.  (That..or they were just very hungry and viewed the us as a potential easy meal!)  Anyway, it occurred to me that taking a picture of gnats is probably not something high on many folk's priority lists.  Perhaps it should be...then, again..perhaps not. Still, I tried.  I found that even with my best efforts, gnat photographing is not easy..especially when they are swarming.  The speed at which these little rascals were moving was far quicker than my camera shutter.  No matter how I tried, the gnats seemed to be blurs or at best streaks.

When you enlarge the picture, the gnats start to look like strange alien beings!  Their movement through the air makes them take on all sorts of shapes when photographed!

After wasting a good bit of time...err..taking a lot of pictures, I decided that this might just be a lost cause.  The world would never have a clear picture of a gnat!  I know that this fact might be upsetting to a lot of folks but it just cannot be done!  At least with my camera and photography skills, it is a definite challenge!  Once inside, I looked at the pictures that I took and was not in the least "pleasantly surprised" at their quality.  I enlarged one of them enough to see the individual gnats and stared at the blips in the picture.  I have seen these somewhere before!  Thinking back several months..or maybe years ago, I seem to recall some profound "new" species of bug found in some remote cave by some amateur spelunkers.  Their "new" bug had a great resemblance to my gnat.  The "aha!" moment hit me...I suppose I could pass these pictures off as a new species to any gullible folks out there!  My common gnat appears to be some weird and wonderful critter!  Some seem to be multi-legged while others have strange wings.  Why..even a few of them look a lot like the starships in some science fiction movie!  My photography skills may lack but the imagination sure does not!  Gnats...those ordinary pests that we all wish would just go away, look like small wonders of the world when viewed in this way.  I do believe I should attempt this feat again some day!  Perhaps in the future, I will figure out a way of getting a clear picture of the bug but in the meantime, I think I will just enjoy the sheer beauty of them in blurry flight!  (At least, they were not biting me!)