Can a dead fly be beautiful?

Warning: No poker content.

As I think most of my readers know, my friend Cardgrrl has been playing a lot less poker lately, and thus not doing much with her poker blog. She has, however, been putting a lot of effort into a second blog that she started late last year, Something Beautiful. With it she tries to encourage readers to notice beauty in apparently ordinary things and scenes that we tend to overlook as mundane.

Today I pretty much hermited myself away in my apartment, except for a trip down to the mailbox. On the way back, I could not help noticing, in the hallway outside my door, the largest fly I have ever seen.









Scale can be hard to appreciate here, so I put a ruler down next to him: 2.7 cm from nose to folded wingtip.



He only moved a little while I was photographing him, so I knew that he was sick or injured or overheated (it being about 110 degrees out).

I came back in and futzed around with some other stuff for a while, including playing the Mookie. When I got around to looking at the above pictures on my computer--especially the second one--I realized that, while I had set out to capture just how fearsome-looking and huge this thing was, I had accidentally caught a flash of beauty in the reflectance and iridescence of its wings.

But I thought maybe I could do better. I went back out to see if it was still there. It was, but it had died in the interim.

Well, there's a photographic challenge: Can I find beauty in a dead fly?

I brought it inside where I could be at least a little more versatile. Still, though, my equipment is just a point-and-shoot Nikon pocket camera, and ordinary household lighting. Not much to work with.

Let's try putting him on a white background:



OK, well, nobody's really at his best in a butt shot.


'

That's a little better--catching some suggestion of the delicacy of the wings with the half-transmitted shadow. Let's see if we can exaggerate that effect with some side lighting:



Well, it's something, anyway. You can see the nice delicacy of the hairs on his legs, too.

When I was growing up, a friend of the family was a professor of entomology. A few times I saw him do slide shows of scanning electron micrographs of insect parts, marvelling at their intricacy and ingenious design. Today I wished I had such an instrument to play with. One of my problems was that I kept running squarely up against the limits of my camera's macro capabilities, which are not great.

For example, the fly's mandibles are really cool--both pointy and scissor-like. I would not want to be bitten by him. But I just couldn't get a sufficiently close view for you to see them well and be as impressed as you should be.



I'm limited to using the largest magnification and cropping away everything else, and even then they don't look as menacing as they do when viewed in person, from up close:



But I have strayed. Menacing does not equal beautiful.

How about trying some dramatic lighting with a hand-held flashlight?






I do kind of like that last one, though I wish I had brushed away some of the schmutz that came in with my guest.

In the end, this was the best I could manage to show you how the lacy wings--which, it must be said, could not possibly ever have supported a beast of this size in flight!--caught the light.




That big, burly body kind of distracts from the effect, so here's the same shot with all the other stuff snipped away:




It doesn't show the rainbow of colors as nicely as I got a glimpse of outside in the sunlight (never in a photo, though), but I think there is undeniably beauty in the structure of the wing and in how it both reflects and transmits the light hitting it, with a distinctly gold tinge. You could almost imagine parts of this image being played with digitally--rotated, multiplied, and stitched together--and made into, oh, I dunno, a lovely textile of some kind. Dontcha think?