The beauty of the natural world lies in the details.

– Natalie Angier

It’s a big world out there, and sometimes overwhelming. Serenity can be found in tiny treasures. Spend time looking closely at the form of a flower, the lacy veins of a leaf, the tiny grains of sand, and feel the wider world melting away.

 Notice the small things. The rewards are inversely proportional.

– Liz Vassey

Regular readers of the Wild Edge may notice that I am drawn to small subjects: dragonflies, snails, lizards, flowers, seeds. While I enjoy landscape photography, it usually isn’t long before I’m isolating part of a scene, or zooming in close on some little detail.

So it was inevitable; I recently purchased a macro lens. For the uninitiated, macro lenses take extreme close-up photos, often of very small subjects. I took it for a walk along the bay beach at Corson’s Inlet State Park, at the southern tip of Ocean City.

Now I will readily admit I violated the First Law of Macro Photography: I didn’t use a tripod. This was just a trial run, and I didn’t expect anything of the session. To my surprise, a few photos seemed worthy of sharing here. If only to inspire you with the beauty to be found if you take a really close look at the small details of Nature around you.

Notice not just the flowers, but the wasp. Not just the wasp, but the grains of pollen on the wasp. Pollen hitching a ride on flying insects is one way plants reproduce.

 Details create the big picture.

– Sanford I. Weill

A tiny Ghost Crab stares down a leaf. His mottled coloration camouflages him against the sand. We’ll meet his kind again soon.

Hairs for catching pollen. Spikes for – what? Protection against being eaten?

Another seed pod sports the punk-rock spiky look.

 To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.

– William Blake

Grains of sand on a clam shell. Sand is nothing less than teeny-tiny rocks and minerals, many grains as translucent as glass.

Sand and shell on an autumn leaf. The lacy veins carry vital materials in and out of the leaf, including chlorophyll, a green pigment critical to the energy production of photosynthesis. When chlorophyll production ceases in fall, the green fades away and the red and yellow pigments already present in the leaf are revealed.

 I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.

– Leo Buscaglia

 A closer look at a crab leg, dressed in the colors of a sunset.

When it all feels too much, take  time for a walk, and lose yourself in the tiny details of life at the wild edge.

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

– Aristotle