Native Bee on Sun Orchid

Three of our Camera Club members travelled to White Bay again today. We were off on a Wild Orchid Hunt. One of our team had not done any macro photography before today so it was all new to him. He borrowed my 60 mm Nikon lens and then had a go with my 105 mm lens. It opened up a whole new world to him. He thought the close-ups of some orchids were pure magic. The other of our trio is young Joe, a teenager. He has taken to macro work like a duck to water. Never before have I seen such dedication and determination to get “the right shot”. Both he and I spent hours and hours longer than we had planned up on the bush tracks looking for late flowering orchids. It was a blazing sun-shiny day and hot out of the breeze. We found it hard work to get decent images in contrasty conditions and with a sporadic and most annoying breeze blowing. Eventually we returned to the beach itself. There were people everywhere enjoying the hot weather both in and out of the water.
I have chosen this image of a tiny native bee on a Sun Orchid. Once home I had to do some research on tiny native bees….. And Sun Orchids. It all adds to new learning for me. Joe is a mine of information about the natural world. He is an amazing young man for his age and I believe will become a real expert at nature photography.