Fun Friday: How Bees Make Honey

By Jim | Published May 19, 2017




Yesterday morning, I decided to go check out Snowball Hill Prairie, a wonderful prairie remnant near my rural Missouri home. This past winter, the Missouri Prairie Foundation (MPF) did a controlled burn on the remaining half of the prairie (the first half was burned in the winter of 2016) and I wanted to see what […]

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A New “Play Place”

By Jim | Published May 16, 2016




McDonald’s has nothing on me … I now have a new “play place” available for prairie wildflower photography! Last summer, the Missouri Prairie Foundation (MPF) purchased a natural prairie remnant not too far from my home. As a member of MPF, I attended a tour of this new prairie a few weeks ago and have […]

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Spiderworts in Good Bloom

By Jim | Published May 6, 2016




While at Shaw Nature Reserve a week ago, the Spiderwort wildflowers were in very good bloom, seemingly growing everywhere! Here are a few of my favorite images (without my macro lens, which I left at home): I will likely not be posting for a couple of days or so. I’m heading to Springfield, Missouri shortly […]

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Fun Friday: Pollinator At Work!

By Jim | Published February 26, 2016




Today’s “Fun Friday” post features a wonderful, Green Metallic Bee that is busy pollinating one of my favorite prairie wildflowers … the Spiderwort. Using a macro lens and tripod, I was able to get quite close to this busy little guy; he was so engrossed with his job of pollinating, that he paid little attention […]

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Spiderwort Continues to Bloom

By Jim | Published June 24, 2014




Today I’m featuring a few more Spiderwort wildflower images from recent hikes on a nearby Missouri prairie. Our continued rains have prompted these beauties to continue blooming. And although some spent flowers are found on some plants, there are still a lot of unopened buds! The first two images are focus-stacked images, each one combining […]

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Beeeeutiful!

By Jim | Published June 22, 2014




Yesterday morning, I made a quick hike around the nearby prairie to scout for my upcoming “Native Missouri Wildflower and Prairie Creatures“ workshop. In a word, “Wonderful”! There are a lot of different species of wildflowers in bloom right now, as well as prairie insects. Of particular beauty was the Green Metallic Bees (species not […]

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Spiderwort, a Focused Look

By Jim | Published June 3, 2014




While photographing in Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains, I did a lot of shooting for focus-stacking, a technique I’ve been playing around with lately. Focus-stacking is the process of making many images of the subject, using a very shallow depth of field (DOF), and varying the focusing point. Once a set of images has been captured, they […]

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Spring Fever!

By Jim | Published March 22, 2014




Well, the last 2 days of spring was nice! Now it’s back to winter for 3-4 days, including a chance of snow … as I slip deeper into the burning sensations of spring fever, I pulled today’s images from the vault … during a true spring/summer season! Buds are beginning to appear on a lot […]

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Spiderwort

By Jim | Published June 12, 2013




Over the past few days, I’ve hiked a nearby, natural Missouri prairie, looking for wildflowers. One of the prevalent blooming wildflowers at this time is the Spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis), which is one of my favorite, late-spring wildflowers. In the first 2 images, you can see the remains of a heavy dew on the plants. The […]

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Spiderwort … Love Those Blues! (Repost)

By Jim | Published September 4, 2012




(Originally posted May 2010) A couple of mornings ago, I visited my new-found prairie to see what wildflowers were blooming. As soon as I entered the meadow area, I was greeted with several really nice stands of several wildflower species! In this post, I will highlight the Spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis) plant. I was surprised at the […]

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