Althea has been in bloom, and the bumblebees are buzzing. There's been a feeding frenzy for the nectar, and quite a bit of pollen being transferred. I used up more than a couple hours over the course of a few days photographing bumblebees and althea..... and in the process I ran across a few bugs/insects/spiders aside from the bumblebees. The althea brings in the hummingbirds as well, but so far they've outsmarted me. Anything's fair game when the camera's in the hand, including ants.

Basic information below copied and pasted to photography pieces in my EBSQ portfolio:

I use an old Adobe Photo Deluxe digital program for cropping and digital effects. The photographs that don't make mention of effects are straight off the camera as-is. Digital photography is merely a hobby for me at this point, and this would be apparent to any professional photographer who got a gander at my camera. As a hobbyist, I'm learning on a Fuji Finepix S6000fd, a fairly basic amateur's camera that got great reviews for the humble price. This $600 camera gave me some pretty solid manual controls to practice with. The picture stabilization sucks according to the pro's reviews, so I can blame some of my photos on this setback. I like the face detection and 28-300mm zoom. It's a far cry from the $4,000+ Nikon D3 Santa refuses to bring me. That's okay, I haven't learned enough about digital photography to be requesting a $4,000 camera. Yet