Bee in flight

Last Sunday was probably the last nice day of our summer, and the sun shone from early morning until sunset.  I started the day in Cork, finished it in Dublin, and visited Galway in between.  As I packed the car in Cork to set out on the long way round to Dublin, I noticed butterflies and bees busy enjoying the last of the sunshine on some flowers in the garden, and before I put my camera in the boot, spent ten minutes trying to photograph them.

I discovered two things. One: I’d probably like a macro lens.  Two: Photographing butterflies and bees is difficult.  When I later uploaded the resultant images onto my laptop, I discovered a third: I made the task much more difficult than I needed to.  Let me explain.

The lack of a macro lens saw me first using my 50-150mm lens at the longer end, with the aperture wide open to throw the background out of focus, and thanks to the abundance of sunshine, a super fast shutter speed of 1/5000s.

Finding the focus a little slow on that lens (about it’s only failing), I switched to my Nifty Fifty – the f/1.8m Nikon 50mm prime lens.  I kept the exposure settings the same, rather than open the aperture up to the f/1.8, based on the thinking that f/2.8 was doing a good job blurring the background anyway, and lenses tend to be sharper away from the extremes of their apertures.  So stopping down from the maximum aperture was likely to give me better image quality.

I was shooting in continuous focus mode, with 3D tracking enabled, so the camera, in theory, will track the point of focus and follow an object (or a bee or a butterfly) as it moves through the frame.

In reality, because I didn’t have a macro lens with which to photograph these guys, the bees and butterflies were quite small in the frame and so the focus point often lost them, switching to the flowers in the background on occassion.

Also, they quite naturally moved all the time, and in unpredictable ways, though you could begin to identify a pattern with the butterflies alright, who quite methodically moved around each flower before fluttering to a neighbouring one.  Which neighbouring one, though, was impossible to predict.

In the end I took about 170 shots, many on motor-drive where, as my brother-in-law liked to note, I “fired off a burst of shots” at 6 frames per second.  (It’s true, I use that phrase a lot!).  Of that 170, on a quick initial edit I identified about 12 that were usable.  That’s a poorer batting average than I am used to these days, but I was happy to be honest even to get just one.

The 158 that weren’t usable showed me where I could have made life easier for myself.  For a start, I should have stopped down the aperture closer to f/5.6.  The depth of field in most of the shots is unnecessarily shallow, and indeed I ended up with more “keepers” from the last few shots where I switched to my fisheye lens to get really in close (that thing will focus a few centimeters away), and that lens has practically infinite depth of field.  Also, I should have manually prefocused the camera, and relied on the combination of the motor drive firing at 6 frames per second and the depth of field afforded by a smaller aperture to maximise my chances of a bee or a butterfly flying through my chosen focus plane, and getting me a nice sharp shot.

The photo above is one where this effectively occurred, but I was in auto-focus mode with my too-wide aperture, and I guess I just got lucky.  Of the 170 shots I took, it is the only one where I caught one of my subjects in flight and in focus.