amongst the ruins in MachuPicchu

Typically when I shoot autumn images, I am biased toward early autumn so that there is more green with only some yellows and orange. I so much appreciate the lush greens that nature produces and it looks so full of life. Although fall colours are quite beautiful, I still prefer to maintain a fair amount of green in the photo as this makes the other autumn colours more pronounced and appreciable.

overlapping leaves on a young Sycamore Tree

home grown soda bottles? well, not quite. laying across the bottom of the photo is the edge of a daisy's stem, and the 'bottle' is a single hair/fuzz (1/60 of an inch in height) protruding from that stem. daisy plants have bristly stems (in between soft and prickly) so the fuzz has a larger diameter making it more stiff, and as we recently discovered... it's also hollow and uniquely shaped. to add a little colour, we placed a small piece of yellow tractor-feed paper as a background, so that the out-of-focus hole created a nice glow on the horizon.

clearly appearing like something out of a Hollywood special-effects laboratory, this unreal-looking skin is actually quite common and is perhaps devouring something right outside your back door... it is a super-closeup of a June Bug's thorax (shoulder blade equivalent). the June Bugs in our area are an uninteresting plain brown, but as we explored it's outer surface, we noticed a very small metallic-looking shiny spot. far too small to see with the naked eye, we zoomed in on this spot and discovered it to be made up of many 'skin' cells of reds, oranges, and yellows each measuring around 1/3000 of an inch across. the green jellybean-like objects are actually pits in the bug's shell and have a hair growing out of each one (similar to a human pore). these deep bowel-shaped pits (about 1/400 of an inch long) were lined with more metallic-type cells that reflected our lighting back in various greens.

despite it's appearance, this is not a coral reef growth, nor anything under the ocean. it is actually a closeup shot within the center of a daisy. we were surprised to discover that the flower's fuzzy brown cone was made up of these finger-like structures that looked so much like something under the sea. the photo captures 0.036 x 0.054 inches (about the thickness of a DVD) of the flower's center cone.

a closeup shot of an Amanita Bisporigera mushroom... more specifically the thin fleshy fins on the underside of the mushroom's top. each of the fins measure 0.0048 inches in thickness (like a typical sheet of paper). i found it interesting that the seemingly simple brown fins were speckled with millions of tiny dots arranged into clusters that made up the brown and near-white patches seen here. we made an attempt to photograph these dot patterns extra closeup (resembling the dots on a dice), but our lighting kept cooking the thin and delicate mushroom fin before a quality photograph could be obtained. we'll probably try again using a refrigeration plate or ice to keep the tiny fin fresh.