Yes, it’s really spring! This picture can prove it.

This picture was taken in the early afternoon, and I used the flash technique to soften the shadows due to sun light. Of course I used super macro mode too.

Why one have to resist temptation to take a picture of a flower? It seems that macrophotography was invented just to capture pollen grains in a picture!

[update: this photo had participated at Photo Friday in 25-11-05 ‘Yellow’ challenge as link n.866]

Focal length was 17mm in Macro mode and so you can see some little yellow pollen grains on white petals. The peculiar light in the photo is due to the moment, during the afternoon of few days ago, when this photo was taken and when the sky was without a cloud and the sun was low on the horizon. It’s important to be able to wait a better light.

Daisy’s scientific name is Bellis perennis, that means always beautiful in latin. In the language of the flowers to present the small B. perennis means: I will think of you. (source thais.it)

This picture shows one famous mexican jumping bean that I’ve bought in a stall in front of the University last year. The original name is exactly “brincadores” . It is not really a bean, it just looks like one. And it jumps and vibrates because it contains a crysalis of a future-butterfly.

Here it is the way it works. A small moth lays its eggs on the flower of a shrub called the Sebastiana palmieri. After the egg hatches, the baby caterpillar buries itself in the plant’s developing seed pod. As the pod grows, it closes up around the comatose caterpillar, leaving it trapped inside. Eventually the caterpillar [a crysalis in this step] builds a tiny web, and by yanking on it he makes the pod (bean) jump. Its next stop could be Hong Kong or Atlantic City [or Rome…], wherever the jumping bean marketplace has a paying customer in need of a novelty.

This little circus act of nature takes place exactly twenty days after the first rain of the season, usually in June. The hotter it gets, the more they jump. This will continue for three to six months before the caterpillar mutates into a moth and, flying, finds freedom. (source MexicoFile)

In this macrophotography you can see the pod (on the left) with a hole by which the cocoon (on the right) was coming out. Moth leaves its cocoon breaking it on the bottom side.

Have you ever seen a whole drops family? There are the fat father, the mother followed by the little sons. Note the reflection of the tap on the drops surfaces.

[update: this photo had participated at Photo Friday in 03-25-05 ‘Tiny’ challenge as link n.549]
[update: this photo is participating at Photo Friday in 03-25-05 ‘Imperfection’ challenge as link n.550]

This picture was taken with an exposure of 1/1000 sec, a focal lenght of 17 mm (Macro), F/8,3, white balance tungsten (I was in a bathroom with a simple light bulb of about 3000 K).

Physically the picture show the motion of a group of water drops into a space-time deformed because of earth presence. Their trajectory is a geodesic.

Today I’ve learn to use the Macro and Super Macro functions. Taking close-up pictures of small things is called “macro photography” and allow to see a large number of small particulars. Like my stone-made turtle called “Rughy” framed in my Zen garden made of white sand:

Meanwhile I was taking the picture, she (the turtle) was climbing a fragment of solid lava coming from Mt. Etna (Sicily).

The following is the same picture blowed up. One can touch the power of Macro and 5Mega pixels that allow to see some Rughy age wrinkles and some grains of sand with a great definition: