you've won second prize

Remember that from Monopoly?  One of the Community Chest cards read "You have won second prize in a beauty contest.  Collect £25"!!  The cheek of it!

Anyway, two images today very much unworthy of first prize but second is good enough, I guess.

The first is of a honeysuckle flower.  I watched a bee as it carefully and meticulously visited each flower on the honeysuckle bush over our patio and rather than try and keep up with it I figured I'd just pre-focus on a flower four or five down the line from the bee's current position and then snap it just as it landed.

I think you can guess where this is going.

That's right.  It landed on every single flower except the one my camera was focused on.  And then it was gone.  Anyway, with the golden early evening light illuminating the flower, I think I got a decent enough shot with or without said pollinator!

Fujifilm X-H2, Fujinon 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 @ 400mm
1/640th of a second at f5.6, ISO 125
handheld

And this second shot of a cosmos was taken purely by accident.  I was just carrying my camera from one location to another, thinking it was switched off, dangling at knee height.  It wasn't, as you can see switched off, and the accidental shot of the cosmos is I feel quite nice.  Some people might call it abstract floral art, while others just out of focus rubbish. 

It's the latter, isn't it?

Regardless, I like it just because there is a slither of in-focus flower at the bottom right of the image while the just is an out of focus mess.

Fujifilm X-H2, Laowa 65mm f2.8 ultra-macro
1/4000th of a second at f2.8, ISO 125
handheld - loosely!

I'm going to take one of my short breaks for the summer (if we have one that is) so see you all in a few weeks :-)

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I'm also taking a YouTube break, so the video below will be my last one until August.  It's all about finding out what is the best small filming set up for a small YouTube channel.  If that's your bag then you know what to do…

While you're there, might as well watch this one as well: