For the past 2 years Krista and my lives have been upended; by the unexpected, naturally! I won’t go into the details … but it probably suffices to say old age ain’t for the faint hearted, even though it can be expected!

And it’s not just Krista and I as others associated with EGST, and the Trust itself, are affected by this phenomenon:  the unexpected.

To quote Br. Edwin “Why me?!”

One of my “go-to” mechanisms for coping with stress is to get out into nature –that’s a story for another time, maybe – with or without my camera. Such events have been limited for me recently but midwinter I was down in the gully below our house looking for fungi – to photograph, not eat! While processing these images one stood out, not for its intrinsic quality, but for what was in it that I had not seen (and had never seen, ever): a tardigrade! I’d been so focussed on the fungus, that the little gem was not part of my awareness.

I used the image to make a greeting card, and wrote a poem to go with it:

 

Life can do that sometimes,

throw up something unexpected!

 

We never know what’s around the corner:

good or bad, but likely unexpected.

 

We might not even notice it until …

until we’ve seen it for the first time!

 

It may be hidden, or out of focus, and then,

suddenly it’s there, a revelation!

 

Tardigrade are tiny animals (this was less than half a mm!) and are also called moss piglets or water bears. They are well known for their ability to survive severely extreme environments, even outer space!

I use a macro photography technique called “focus bracketing”. I take several images of the subject, focussing on different parts of it, and then process them by “focus stacking”, where software combines the sharpest part of each image into a single image. Here I’d taken 30 images focussing from the front to the back of the fungus, and my little critter had crawled into the frame from behind the fungus just in time to be in focus on the last couple of frames. Wow!

Sometimes the unexpected can be devastating. This was revelatory, and for me the circumstances of its creation makes this image one of my favourites!

The moral of the story: Expect the unexpected, there may be a silver lining!