Macro Monday 27, the lily and the ants

I haven't done a Macro Monday for a while, and this was sort of accidental. We had the black lilies out front almost destroyed by hail just as they were coming into their prime. I was so disappointed. They're a difficult shot because of the colour.

Then I realized there are some growing in a bed along with the Dread Alberta Rose, and they're doing quite well. Unless the hail comes from a really weird angle (knock wood) they should be ok. I was working on capturing the texture, preferably with ants, then realized using the extension tubes would work really well. I'm not sure why the ants were all over it, since they hadn't particularly been on the ones out front. But you'd think these were peonies from their enthusiasm.

So here you go. First a regular photo to set the stage.

Two similar shots, capturing the lovely texture, and ants with their cute little hairy butts. You'll have to embiggen, of course, or squint really hard.

That yellow glow was almost radioactive, lighting up the deep inside of the blossom.

I passed over this one at first, since the ants are out of focus. Then I thought about how far an ant's butt is above the surface it's walking on, and realized how much I liked the texture of the petal. It struck me this was a good demo, once again, of how narrow the plane of focus is in the macro world.

I found this one later on. These are the black lilies out front, before the hail.