Today’s blog post is short … spent the weekend preparing/attending my older daughter’s marriage (Congratulations, Rick and Jami!), so not much time to pull together a more comprehensive post for today. Last month, while hiking the local natural prairie, I found the obvious artwork of a leaf miner on a wild plum leaf:
A leaf miner is the larva of an insect that lives in and eats the leaf tissue of plants. The vast majority of leaf-mining insects are moths, sawflies and flies, though beetles and wasps also exhibit this behavior. Leaf miners are usually not damaging to plants, although theirs beautiful artwork (a result of their tunneling throughout the leaf) can be quite unsightly on an attractive, ornamental plant. In this case, which I believe is a wild plum, a little damage would be a good thing … wild plums are one of the most invasive plants on the Missouri prairie, and the loss of some wild plums certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Photographic Equipment Used:
- Canon 5D Mark 3 body
- Canon EF180mm, f/3.5 macro lens
- Bogen 3221 tripod with Graff Studioball SB-QR ballhead
- ISO 640
- Aperture f/3.5
- Shutter 1/200 sec.
- Focus-stacked image of 12 images (of varying focusing point), combined in HeliconFocus software