A Pinkish Beetle

Yesterday morning I hopped out of bed at about six a.m. and headed over to the parking lot to take a few images of the old Woolco/Big Lots/Burlington Coat Factory demolition that is going on at Graceland Shopping Center. The light was not very good, but I did manage to produce the HDR image above. I'm starting to get the hang of HDR. I purposely made this scene more surreal than realistic. I'm pushing the limits to see what I like and what I can't stand, and I'm thinking I pushed it just a bit too much. It is cool looking, but the results don't look like the scene that I was actually photographing.

After taking several bracketed exposures at different angles, I went down to the field behind the demolition site. Can you believe that most of my pictures come from the fields, forest, and river that are just 500-1000 feet west of this area of destruction?

The field this morning was covered with dew, the cloud cover was heavy, and the insects were wet and slow moving. This very cool pinkish beetle really caught my eye. I'm not sure if this is a lady beetle. It seems slightly more oblong and pinkish. This is surely a picture for bugguide.net



This time, I've uploaded two crops of the same image so you can get a better view of the detail of the insect. In the field, I hadn't noticed the tiny plant part that had attached itself to the beetle. Can you see it? Perhaps this came from the plant it was crawling on, Daucus carota or wild carrot or Queen Anne's lace. I'm always amazed how I'm still seeing fascinating new creatures in this park after studying and photographing it for over two years. I can't wait to see what we find when we move to our new house. There is no doubt that I will return often to Kenney Park to see what fascinating creatures I can photograph, ones just as bright and spectacular as this pinkish beetle.

Tom