Insect Mounds, AZ
I’ve always enjoyed looking for interesting patterns and taking photos of things many other people don’t notice or just ignore if they do notice. I guess that helps explain my fascination with close up photography and the number of Nikon macro lenses I’ve owned over the years (2 or 3 versions of the old 55mm, the 105/2.8 in both manual and auto focus versions, the enduring 200/4 in manual focus). And I’ll even use my 300/2.8 “bird” lens on extension tubes if I need to for dragonflies along a stream edge.
Now that I’ve added the compact 55-200 DX “plastic” lens to my gear I’m able to return to this type of subject matter whenever I’m out walking. The image at top was taken a few days ago at Veterans Oasis Park, where I spent most of my time photographing ducks and Killdeer. A lot of insects that live in the ground create these miniature mounds that look like lunar volcanos, so I”m not sure what made these. But I like the way the low sun picks out the rims and makes them three dimensional.
Taken with the D70 and 55-200 at 66mm, ISO 400, 1/125th at f/9 hand held.
To show I’ve been shooting a lot of the same subjects for a long time I dug out an old scan from a 35mm Kodachrome slide dating from around 1980 or so. This was taken along my driveway in Freehold, NJ, with a 105mm macro lens and probably a tripod. These mounds were definitely the work of ants.
Ant Mounds, NJ
