There's a neat bee fly in our garden. He's brown and fuzzy. He tends to stay in one place for about ten seconds, then fly to a new spot or return pretty much to the same spot after flying around for a while. This bee fly is shy, so I've been trying to take a photo of him at much less than 1:1. This is the clearest I got, a photo captured just as he/she was taking off. I'm sad I didn't get more but happy I happened to get a clear shot of the takeoff.
Since I've moved from my obsession with photographing ants I've been having a bit of difficulty photographing things that aren't 5mm long. Ants, besides being small, are pretty horizontal, meaning that a lot can be captured with minimal depth of field. Bees on flowers or larger flies, wasps, and bees in general, are difficult to capture doing something ineresting at 1:1 magnification. Either depth of field limitations ruin important detail or interesting context just doesn't fit. I'm having to experiment with less than 1:1 magnification, flash levels, and aperture to keep getting good bokeh.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
All that I got
