Life of Wry

On this drippy, rainy day, I thought it was a good time to check out a photo exhibit installed at Logos, a local (quite cool) used bookstore. Hard for me, because the subjects of the photos were bugs.. and worse, beetles. Beetles, gorgeous as they are to entomologists, are repulsive to me. It’s just one of my phobias.. hard-shelled insects. Not sure why that fear imbedded in me, but.. there you go. My old buddy Larry (whom I met when he tuned my beloved (inherited) baby grand piano over thirty years ago) sent me an invite and I felt somewhat obligated to attend. He’s a skilled photographer and I knew it would be a thoughtful, worthy exhibit, but, you know: beetles.

I steeled myself and attended. There were 40 enlarged photos mounted on the walls high above the bookshelves. Safe. I was grateful there were all kinds of non-beetle insects! I think, out of the 40 photos, only 3 had beetles. One was even kind of cool… a bright, iridescent blue beetle face, but I didn’t spend too much time on him anyway. Definitely another couple that were cringe-worthy.. but the majority were flies, bees, wasps… things like that.

Here were a couple faves… this dragonfly wing:

And these two little sleeping bees:

Funny you can see books, and even me, in the reflection. I hadn’t noticed that… so meta.. me photographing a photograph. And I’m sure in that process, esp as my camera is an iphone, a lot of resolution is lost. But trust me, these photos are remarkably crisp and detailed in person.