Too Small to Notice

Most days, I move through the world without really seeing it.

I see the big things: the buildings, the sky, the people who are roughly my size. I notice whatever blocks my way or demands a quick reaction. But the smaller something is, the easier it is to ignore. A petal on the ground. A drop of water on a leaf. A fly on the window. A bee hovering too close. A beetle crossing the path.

My first instinct is usually to brush it away, step over it, close the window.

Then I picked up a macro lens.

Suddenly the things I’d never bothered to look at became impossible to unsee. A single drop of water turned into a tiny lens, holding a bent version of the world inside it. A flower I thought I knew by heart rearranged itself into patterns and textures I’d never noticed, like a city seen from above for the first time.

And then came the insects.

A bee, frozen in one sharp frame, not just as a blur of yellow and black, but as a body covered in fine hair, dusted with pollen, carrying a sting you can actually see. A fly, the kind I would usually chase away from the table, suddenly fills the whole image. Huge eyes. A face that is not human, not cute, but not exactly ugly either. Just precise. Designed. Alive.

Up close, the line between beautiful and disturbing gets very thin.

There is a beetle, bright red, as if someone painted it with nail polish and sent it out to walk on a blade of grass. I had no idea this color existed in the undergrowth. There are wings that look like stained glass, legs that end in hooks, patterns that seem too careful to be random, too strange to be invented.

The camera doesn’t care about my preferences. It treats everything with the same seriousness.

When I look through the macro lens, I’m forced to stay with things I would normally reject after a second. The sting of the bee. The hair on the fly’s body. The mouthparts I don’t have names for. I can’t soften them or tidy them up. I can only look longer, and notice what that does to me.

At first, I flinch.
Then I get curious.
Then, somehow, I feel a kind of respect.

These small lives are going on all the time, under our feet, right next to our coffee cups, on the flowers we photograph from a safe, pretty distance. They work, eat, fight, rest, without needing us to like them. We are the ones passing through their frame.

This series is an invitation to stop for a moment and enter that world.

To see a fly not as a dirty interruption, but as a creature with a face and a design. To notice that a beetle’s shell glows like lacquer. To understand that a single drop of water is enough to hold a landscape. To accept that beauty isn’t always soft or easy. Sometimes it has claws. Sometimes it buzzes in your ear.

Most of the time, these details are too small to notice.

But once you’ve seen them, it’s hard to go back to pretending they’re not there.