This bug's eye view of the world takes place on one of the Hobbitt's sunflowers, back when we lived in New York. It was shot with a digital camera with built-in macro capability, so no close-up lenses were required.

A friend of mine asked if the image was "Photoshopped." The answer is yes, it was retouched, but not with Photoshop. I use other programs for this sort of thing.

You're probably thinking that I took the ant from another picture and added it to this one. Nope. The ant was there. So what was retouched? The sunflower.

The problem was that there wasn't a solid yellow background of sunflower petals. There were gaps where you could see other parts of the garden. Very distracting. So I filled in the gaps with petals from other parts of this image.

Like most of my retouching, this was done to remove extraneous detail from an image, yielding a simpler image that's more interesting.

That's what the Impressionists did.