macro photography – destinylaharris

📸 Learning to Look Closer #14: The Thing I Wanted to Look Away From

I am terrified of spiders.

And I don’t mean:

“Ew. Spider.”

I mean my heart races.

My palms sweat.

My breathing changes.

My entire body goes into panic mode before the logical part of my brain has even had time to remind me that I am significantly larger than the thing currently ruining my day.

So naturally—

I took her picture.

😂

And somehow, out of all the pictures I could have taken of a spider I desperately wanted nowhere near me…

she decided to pose.

One leg stretched upward.

The others perfectly angled.

Body turned just enough to show off every stripe, every little patch of color, every horrifying hair on those ridiculously long legs.

She looks like she knew exactly where the camera was.

Which feels unnecessarily confident for something that almost made me leave my own backyard.

But then I looked at the photo.

Actually looked.

And—

damn it.

She’s beautiful.

I hate that.

😂

Her legs aren’t just black.

They’re banded with orange and yellow.

Her abdomen has this complicated pattern running across it that I never would have noticed if I hadn’t gotten close enough to take the picture.

Even the little hairs on her legs—the part I find particularly offensive—catch the light.

There is so much detail packed into something my brain normally reduces to one word:

SPIDER.

Danger.

Nope.

Get it away from me.

And I think that’s the interesting part.

Looking closer didn’t make me less afraid of her.

I didn’t take the picture and suddenly become a spider person.

Absolutely not.

I still wanted distance.

A lot of it.

Preferably several zip codes.

But for a minute, fear stopped being the only thing I could see.

There was fear.

And there was color.

Pattern.

Texture.

Structure.

Beauty.

All occupying the exact same frame.

I think sometimes we assume appreciating something means we have to stop being afraid of it.

Maybe we don’t.

Maybe two things can be true at once.

She scared the absolute shit out of me.

And—

she is gorgeous.

I can admit that.

From over here.

Very, very far away.

😂🖤

Maybe looking closer isn’t always about discovering that something wasn’t scary after all.

Sometimes it’s just about noticing that fear wasn’t the whole story.

Until next time,

-Destiny

P.S. Have you ever found something beautiful even though it scared you?

October 7, 2026

Learning to Look Closer #6

see this thing all the time.

It’s a sensory board we have at work, covered in hundreds of tiny sequins. The kids can run their hands across them, flip them back and forth, change the colors, make patterns, or sometimes just enjoy the feeling of them moving beneath their fingers.

Normally, I see it from above.

A bunch of colorful sequins.

Then I put my camera almost level with it.

And suddenly, it looked enormous.

Individual sequins became little overlapping discs of color. The ones closest to my camera stayed sharp while everything behind them melted into tiny circles of light.

It almost looked like a landscape.

Nothing about the sensory board had changed.

I had.

Or, more specifically, my perspective had.

That’s something I love about photography.

It gives me an excuse to look at ordinary things from angles I probably never would otherwise.

Sometimes looking closer really does mean getting closer.

Other times, it means getting lower.

Turning something around.

Looking underneath it.

Standing somewhere you normally wouldn’t.

Because sometimes there isn’t anything new waiting to be discovered.

Sometimes you’ve already seen it a hundred times.

You just haven’t seen it like this yet.

— Destiny

P.S. Pick something ordinary around you today and look at it from an angle you normally wouldn’t. You might be surprised by what it turns into.

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August 19, 2026

Learning to Look Closer #4

Most people probably wouldn’t have stopped for her.

She was just a little brown moth outside near the cat food.

And with cats around, that probably wasn’t the safest place for her to be.

So I picked her up.

I expected her to fight me.

To flutter her wings, scramble away, or do whatever tiny moths do when a giant human suddenly decides to scoop them up.

She didn’t.

She just let me.

No fighting.

No struggling.

She sat completely still on the tip of my finger while I carried her somewhere safer.

And maybe I’m giving a tiny moth far too much credit, but in that moment, it felt a little like trust.

So, naturally, I stopped to look closer.

Up close, she wasn’t just a little brown moth anymore.

Her head was covered in soft, golden-brown fuzz. Her wings looked almost like velvet, folded neatly against her back. Her antennae were impossibly thin, and those tiny black legs held onto my finger while I moved her away from danger.

She was beautiful.

Not in the bright, obvious way butterflies tend to be.

Moths are quieter about it.

Butterflies get flowers and gardens and people stopping to take pictures.

Moths get porch lights and people trying to shoo them out of the house.

But look closer.

There’s something beautiful about them, too.

Maybe that’s one of my favorite things about taking pictures.

It gives me an excuse to stop long enough to notice things I might otherwise walk right past.

The fuzzy head.

The tiny feet.

The way plain brown wings turn almost golden when the light hits them.