Waiting to see if the sky gets interesting or casts some shadow at all today. If it does, I might go out and do some flower-and-insect photography for a short while. (The heat and humidity weigh heavily against a long expedition.)
In the end, I think I’m fondest of the flower-and-insect shots that aren’t with a macro lens where I’ve had to merge a set of tripod-aided shots. For one, getting lucky and finding an insect that doesn’t move very much is a rare thing unless I do the spray-sugar-water trick, which gets some species to hold still while they lap up the unexpected bounty. (I don’t do the “put a nearly-frozen but-still-alive insect on a flower as if it were naturally there” thing.) Sometimes a moving insect on a series of macro shots will move enough that it doesn’t overlap and you end up with an image that looks like there’s five or six insects on the same flower.
The major plus to the macro lens is that it brings features into view, both of flowers and insects, that aren’t so visible to the naked eye. It always makes me think about doing a bit more crude microscope photography—I have a lens that lets me put my DSLR camera body on the two so-so microscopes that I own, and if I play around with light and subject matter, I sometimes get something unexpectedly interesting or beautiful that isn’t a conventional kind of microphotographic image. Maybe that’s a better idea on a hot summer day, now that I think about it.