I shot this image at the Agricultural History Farm Park in Derwood, Maryland this summer where they have a public, trial dahlia garden. While shooting the dahlias, I found a jumping spider in a white dahlia. While I was shooting the spider, a hover fly landed on the petal above the spider. I quickly focused on the fly’s eyes and got one shot before it flew away. I focus-stacked the image with the one I took moments before that was focused on the spider’s eyes to get the final image.

My wife and I spend two weeks a summer at the Jersey Shore: the first week in June (when the crowds have not yet arrived) and the first week in October (when the crowds have all gone home). We love sitting (practically alone) on the beach and enjoy this biannual meditative time by the ocean to bookmark the summer season. During these wonderful vacations, we often share the beach with the sea gulls who are no doubt wondering where all the free food is from all the beach-goers’ beach baskets. In this shot, the gulls were sitting on a rocky jetty, presumably with keen keys waiting and searching for food to appear, be it clams, shrimp, bugs, or even plankton.. I had little or no experience with long exposure photography, so this was an opportunity to experiment. I used my iPhone 16 Pro with an app called ReeHeld, which uses AI to permit hand-held long exposure shots (1 second, in this example.)