For an hour or two today, I crawled around outside in the hot sun looking for interesting insects. I think closeup pictures of nature are the ones I enjoy taking the most. The different bugs today had varying levels of difficulty. In the end, I was tired, hot, and sweaty, and my camera felt like it was baking.

It seems that the smaller an insect, the less concerned it is about you being near it. Big insects seem to always identify you as "predator" so it's pretty hard to get close to them. The bee today was surprisingly peaceful and unconcerned that I was poking a camera within an inch of it. Maybe it had brain damage...

Dragonflies, on the other hand, are extremely twitchy. The only two large ones that I got a picture of were miracles, because they flew around like crazy, and then suddenly just landed within a few feet of me. This allowed me to move closer and closer towards it. Any significant movement at all, and they would be gone in an instant.

There was a dragonfly hover pretty high above me. It seemed to have a huge body with something on each side. After staring at common, everyday bugs for so long, I desperately wanted to take pictures of whatever it was, since I'd never seen anything like it before. It never came down before flying away.

The tiny blue dragonflies were the hardest insects to take pictures of today. They seem to feel the slightest tremor in the ground, take flight, and then land a few feet away. I spent the longest time getting only two or three pictures of one. The most frustrating insects are the ones that barely fly out of reach when you come within a distance you're happy with. It's as if they're taunting you or something. Definitely smarter than the bee though...

Still about a month before college starts up.