For a brief moment, if I’m lucky, a fly like the one pictured above stands still long enough for me to find the focus and hit the shutter button. This photograph is an echo of that moment — the one where things were still — and we see the details for as long as we want of ephemeral things like a hover fly standing on the petals of a tiny flower. The bug flies off, and maybe I stalk it for a bit, but after I’m good and tired and my knees can’t stand the crouching anymore, it really does fly off and it’s gone. I feel lucky to capture the photo — it is a complete memory but also only a fragment at the same time — but the moment of beauty and life is gone for good, or at least, once and forever removed. It makes sense, too: there are a lot of little flowers and a lot of little flies, and they must go as they must come. Everything has its allotted time. It is a horribly beautiful world sometimes with all these photos pulling us in and out of the line of time, but I still want to shoot them; I don’t want to forget.

For your bug information, the fly pictured above is of the Family Syrphidae, the hover or flower flies. These benign creatures often have yellow and black coloration to mimic certain members of the Hymenoptera (i.e. bees and wasps), but they aren’t biters or stingers (just flower children). In this particular picture, it is hard to see, but as in other flies (e.g. horse flies) the position of the eyes can indicate sex; the males have eyes that come together while the females are separated (this looks like a male). I do not remember the exact size of this fly, but it probably came in under a half inch to give you an idea of how small the flower is as well.