Capturing Fireflies

I’ve always loved the simplicity and elegance of the Flash work on Bento Box. This particular illustration of fireflies reminded me of last Sunday evening when I was in Riverside Park (at Crabapple Grove to be exact). There were hundreds of fireflies all around. I grabbed my camera and tried to take a shot of the field dotted with random little lights, but as you can imagine, it really didn’t capture what my eyes saw. As I stood there, I noticed that there were only two others around. An older woman listening to a portable CD player strolled around a bit in the field and a guy sitting on a blanket was making a more serious effort to photograph the glowing bugs. He had set up his camera on a tripod and was trying various exposures. The woman came over to chat with me and told me he wasn’t having much luck either. She added that there should be a saying about something being as “illusive as photographing fireflies.”