Saturday, July 19, 2014

After-The-Fact Discoveries Through the Camera Lens

I can't decide if I'm blind or just too single focused....

Take this photo, for example.  When I took the photo, I was focusing on the cicada that is positioned vertically on the green ash suckers and on the empty "shells" that are located above and to the right of it, one of which I presume it emerged from.  ... Until I looked through my recent photos after downloading them to my computer (the next day), I literally didn't see the second cicada in this photo, located on the horizontal stem above and to the left of the first cicada.  Of course, by then, both cicadas were long gone, so any chance to focus more tightly or to change my framing had disappeared along with them.

Luckily, in this case I did take this second photo, which gave me a little better look at the second cicada...

...and this third photo, which allowed me to incorporate another, newly emerged cicada I had noticed about a foot away, which you can see at the bottom left in this photo.  The original one...er, two are at the top right.

How did I miss that third, newly emerged cicada?!  I wish I knew, because then I might not miss other "minor details" as I'm out and about....

As I did in this next photo, which I took one night earlier this week....

To explain, I'm seeing at least 4 different toads (I think) around the house this summer, but I've been wanting to verify if they are all the same species.  This toad, which is the same size as one I'd seen earlier in the day, had different markings, so I wanted to catch a photo of it.  I was so focused on the toad, however, that I totally missed the click beetle just in front of it on the ground.  I don't recall seeing a click beetle of that size around here before, so I'm really curious as to what species it might be - but it, too, is long gone...although whether it flew away to live for another day or disappeared down the gullet of the toad, I'm not sure!

Oh,in case you're curious, this toad is a Great Plains Toad (Anaxyrus cognatus), while most of the others I see are Woodhouse's Toads (Anaxyrus woodhousii).  I was right to notice the different pattern of spots.

Do you ever make discoveries of this sort in your photos, after you bring them up on your computer screen, or are you a good enough observer that this never happens to you?  I'd sure love to hone my skills of observation enough that this quit happening!  I wonder what else I'm missing when I'm NOT taking photographs?!

No comments:

Post a Comment