As we were gazing out the window at the front yard the day before yesterday, CD commented, as she has so many times before, on how lovely the leaves on our sycamore are when the light illuminates them from behind. So after she had gone off to another part of the house, I affixed the tele-zoom lens to my camera and went out for a few studies. Here are my two favorites. I’ve been playing with filters, too, and I employed one for these images.
Then, yesterday, after a bout of YardWork, as I was cutting up trimmed River Birch branches and stuffing them into recycling containers, a large male Chinese mantis waved at me and asked me to do a portrait session. So I helped him onto one of our sumac bushes, where he quite happily wandered slowly around for the better part of an hour. He was so acrobatic that I decided to call him Mikhail, even though he wasn’t really Russian.
krikitarts 
I read about the Chinese Mantis when I was in college but never so up close and personal!