I’ve seen fighter jets zoooom! overhead, here and gone, just that quickly. I’m not equating the two, but, when a Pipevine Swallowtail  butterfly makes a beeline to a flowerhead, it too wastes not time. Furious motion, wings constantly aflutter, no time to waste, nectar, nectar, nectar. Then, gone. Unlike other butterflies, Pipevines don’t go from the one, to another 1 foot away. No, they fly up, and seem to fly 10 or 20 feet or more, to a distant bloom.

This furtive behavior bedevils the photographer. Meaning, when you’re at the bloom, and you register that this one is fresh, complete and shmeksy! you know that a fine capture will please so many, genuinely uplift them, if only for a moment, but . . . it will impact. You are surely among those of whom I write, aren’t you?

So here, my checklist signaled, get it! A winner. And the position is just wonderful, what with the sun reflecting on those exquisite flashes, spots, washes, expanses of color.

Ft. Indiantown Gap Military Reservation in central Pennsylvania. A huge military installation. F-16’s flew overhead, not 10 minutes before.

What think you? How’d it work out?

Jeff