Vespers

Although I took the photo in Italy, Pompeii to be precise, this is nothing at all to do with scooters. It is instead a final offering for this month’s “Wild Things”

Here is the start of a wasp colony, with the nest being constructed in the eaves of a small metal shelter protecting a Roman mosaic from the weather.

Nikon D300s
Nikkor 18-200 at 200mm
F/6.3 and 1/50s
ISO 200

This was as close as I could get and still have the subject in focus. I was not about to fit the macro lens and get within a mere few centimetres! I cropped the image, but left in some of the metalwork in order to give the subject a sense of scale, and invoked the Rule of Thirds instead of sticking the nest smack in the middle of the frame.

There’s a little Photoshoppery too: in addition to cropping and reducing to 800 pixels, I trimmed the histogram because there was no data at either end, and this really brought up the wasps’ yellow colouring.