What you see is NOT always what you get, especially when you expect to see one thing in a photograph and you find much, much more. I walked outside and noticed that my pathetic Italian parsley that I planted last year and that never grew beyond the size of the two and one-half inch pot it came in, has developed a flower stalk. That probably means it will be going to seed once it flowers and will not ever produce the copious amount of leaves I was expecting for my cooking. I took a few photos to document the phenomenon and when I downloaded them to my computer, this slender, single stalk of parsley revealed an entire bugdom. A couple of aphid appear to be fighting a duel to the death; a slender web stretches between the thin branches; an unknown beetle-like creature rests beneath one of the bud clusters; a pair of tiny, seemingly body-less, iridescent wings hovers atop one of the bud clusters; and another unidentifiable bug, out of focus because of the shallow depth of field, hangs beneath a cluster. I took this photo with my go-to 18-200 mm lens; however, this type of result is pushing me ever closer to a macro lens.
Lens at 200mm
ISO 200
f/5.6
1/500
Cropped
I feel your frustration not having a macro! But this is a nice shot with bokeh and good focus in the shallow DOF (which happens in macro too…).