An alternative view of the world

While I was waiting for honeybees to land on the first flowering shrub in the garden, I spotted this fly. The image is unremarkable, but that's not true of the fly's impressive compound eyes; what a magnificent feat of natural engineering they are. Have you ever stopped to imagine what sort of view of the world they present? Is the image presented as if distorted by a fish-eye lens? Is it fragmented as if viewed through a kaleidoscope? Well, it seems the answer is that each of the hexagonal lenses in the fly's compound eye captures both a slow-motion view of the world and a real-time version. These millions of mini-images are then processed by the brain into one coherent view of the fly's immediate world.

Source: Discover magazine/UCLA 

Canon 350D, Canon 100mm prime macro lens, 1/500th sec, f/6.3, ISO 500