Busy Bee

As I walked through Monivea Woods last Sunday I was keeping an eye out for some wildlife to photograph.  I didn’t see much, but a few insects around the verges of the path stayed still long enough for me to grab a shot or two.  Not having a macro lens, I had to improvise a little with technique to get the photo you see here.  Thankfully, the bee cooperated – just.

Prior to taking this shot, I had wasted 2 or 3 minutes trying to capture two butterflies who appeared to my untrained eye to be doing some sort of a mating ritual in mid air.  As I approached them they were fluttering around a small area so I thought that a photograph would be a possibility.  I was wrong.  The closer I got, the higher they seemed to fly, and even the excellent continuous focus capability of my Nikon D300 camera couldn’t help me out as I couldn’t get an initial focus lock on the amorous pair.   

I walked away after a few minutes without a photo, but with a new found respect for wildlife photographers.  And by wildlife, I mean those who photograph animals actually in the wild, as opposed to in confined locations like some of my previous attempts.  As an aside, this coming weekend I will be getting access to Dublin Zoo an hour before it opens to the general public so stay tuned for some more animal shots next week.

Back to the photograph above.  As I caught up with my fellow walkers, I spotted this bee hovering around a dandelion growing at the side of the path. By the way, maybe this is a wasp – I’m not sure – so apologies if I am incorrectly referring to it as a bee.  I really mean a bee-like creature. (I suspect my wildlife photography career is a long way off!)

As I mentioned yesterday I had only a 50mm lens with me, but one of the advantages of that particular lens is its wide aperture of f/1.8, which means I can use it with normal shutter speeds in low light, or use it with very fast shutter speeds in normal light, and also get a very narrow depth of field.  All these things proved useful for this photograph as I wanted to blur the background to keep attention on the insect, and wanted a high shutter speed to help get a sharp shot given that there was a light breeze blowing the dandelion.  

That said, a macro lens would have been the ideal lens to have here as it would have allowed me get in really close and get a good close-up shot of the bee.  I don’t yet own one, and so I made do with the lens I had.  A benefit of a macro lens is that it usually has the ability to focus on a subject very near to the front of the lens.  My 50mm lens wasn’t quite so strong on this front.  With a moving dandelion, a moving bee, and me working as close to the subject as the lens would focus, I opted to manually focus, not by turning the focus ring, but by presetting the focus to be the nearest to the lens it could be, and then simply moving the camera in and out to achieve the required focus. It’s a technique that can work well when you’re near the limits of the focusing abilities of a lens and prevents the auto focus searching for focus continually, resulting in you missing the shot.

I did try to get a shot of the bee about to take flight just after getting this photograph, by tapping the dandelion with my foot.  I thought I was ready to fire the shutter as soon as he lifted off the dandelion, but he moved much much faster than I expected and before I could even finish blinking he was gone.

By the way a very brief word on the composition to point out that it I’ve used a very classical “rule of thirds” framing with the bee at the intersection of lines that divide the frame both horizontally and vertically into three.  If the theory is correct, it should be pleasing to the eye.