I had company for dinner Wednesday night and with no roses in bloom in the midst of our current heatwave, I clipped a few handfuls of lemon thyme which was in bloom and I thought would look nice on the table. I pulled the thyme leaves off the bottoms of the stems and dropped the stems into pint cream bottles. The pile of tiny leaves on the counter suddenly moved and from beneath the pile emerged a small praying mantis, itself about 1/2 inch long. Of course I ran for my camera. It took a few minutes to get my macro lens on and then to find my table top tripod so I was surprised to find the little creature still where I’d first seen him. But, the sudden appearance of the camera (what do they see with those eyes?) seemed to concern him and he climbed everywhere over and under the leaves and then onto the granite counter surface. I had a hard time manually focusing on the tiny moving creature who would disappear frequently, camouflaged by the leaves. I didn’t change any settings (my bad) so the shutter speeds were very slow and the depth of field was extremely shallow. I did manage to get a couple of marginally in focus head shots before I felt such guilt that I herded the praying mantis onto a piece of paper and took it back outside to the thyme plant.
