I uploaded a couple photos of a butterfly from an outing yesterday at Cedar Point Preserve to my Flickr page. One of them is at the end of this post. If you click the photo it will take you to the Flickr page where you can see lots of my photography, even from my early days when I first started learning to use a real camera. You will notice many of the early ones aren’t so great. I’m not that picky about what I put on my Flickr page. It’s sort of a catch-all for anything I want to share with others.

Anyway, I went out to Cedar Point Preserve hoping to walk the trails down to the marsh and get a nice landscape of it. I started down the trail and found myself distracted by so many little things. Insects, fungi, furry animals (those got away before I could snap a pic)… I even found myself shooting a photo of a big rusty horseshoe shaped piece of metal. Must have been left behind by the trail clearing machine.

At some point I realized that I just didn’t have enough time to walk the rest of the trail to the water so, frustrated, I turned and headed back to the van. I had only taken a few “good” photos (by my own personal definition) and so I was bummed, not depressed mind you, just bummed. As I walked back I continued to be distracted by so many little things. I took two more photos of a banana spider and a beetle-ish bug that I had already taken photos of when I was walking the other direction!

By now I was hot, sweaty, and had gathered several blood sucking friends (if mosquitos have an origin I’m sure it is Cedar Point). I just wanted to get home, shower and have supper. Then there it was, a beautiful orange butterfly fluttering around amongst the grass and various other vegetation. I spent several minutes with this wonderful insect getting photos of it from different angles. It would flutter away. Sometimes I would follow. Other times I would just stand and wait for it to come back my way, and it did several times.

Usually I am much more interested in the big picture, a landscape of mountains, the ocean, a sunset… I don’t typically enjoy taking photos of the little things so much and generally just reserve those for practice shots. This time was different though. That little butterfly put a smile on my hot and sweaty face while at the same time erasing my frustration of not making it to the marsh.

Lesson learned: Sometimes those little things are necessary to bring the bigger picture together. They help you appreciate the fact that within the bigger picture are so very many smaller elements without which there would be no bigger picture.