| 1/2500 | f2.8 | ISO 400 | 150mm | JPEG |
I really work in a beautiful area. It's in the heart of Buckhead, a thriving live-work-and-play area of northern Atlanta. It is dominated by high rise hotels, office buildings, and condominiums. But despite all the concrete and steel, they have done a good job of preserving some green space, too.
I shot this honeybee among a large swath of flowers about 100 yards from my building. I used my 70-200 f2.8L lens to get a clear, sharp, and fast photo. The day was mostly cloudy and the sun was ducking in and out from behind clouds quite a bit. So I left the lens wide open and used ISO 400 to get a fast enough shutter speed for when the sun was blocked.
This shot was in the full sunlight, so it resulted in a really fast shutter speed. But it wasn't fast enough to stop the bee's wings. The blur really drives home that the bee is hovering over the tiny flowers.
This kind of shot is a lot of hard work, but the reward can be great. I shot about 300 photos in 30 minutes, trying to get just two or three like this one, where the bee is actually flying between flowers. You will probably agree, a photo of a bee flying will beat a one of a bee walking any day.
I had to shoot these as JPEGs instead of RAW because my camera will shoot 20 JPEGs in succession, but only 8 RAW images. I would start shooting when I thought the bee might jump off of the flowers and fly to the next batch. If I misjudged (and I did a lot), I would wait for my camera's memory buffer to empty and then shoot a bunch more.
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7 comments:
hey chris,
i'm really enjoying your blog so far.
i also think that your writing and explanations are excellent.
so, just wanted to say thanks! =)
-larisa
Good Morning,
yes these are hard pictres to take, but I think you need to crop in to just the flower and bee...
when i first looked at the picture I saw a green leaf that is bright and in sharp focus, then I saw the bee next to the flowers.
I like the small depth of field that you get with using a large aperture, I also think it’s really cool that you shot at 2500 shutter speed and the bee’s wings still have motion blur. That’s pretty amazing because you can typically stop action on a person running around 1/500 – 1/1000
I should also mention the background on this photo. Notice how I used the darker shadows of a larger bush to really help the flowers and the bee to jump out of the photo. This is a great example of how paying attention to the background can improve your photos.
Thanks for the comment, Brian.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that I don't like the green leaf in the middle, either.
I don't like to 'blur' parts of an image using Photoshop (I prefer to do that with the lens), but maybe I can go back to the original and do some selective sharpening on the bee and flowers. That will leave the leaf unsharpened, which will take away some of the attention it receives.
Thank you, Larisa. This has been fun, and I am glad to know there are people following it and feel it is informative!
Love this picture!! Please explain RAW and how to set the camera to that mode.
Sheree, thanks for compliment. I was going to comment here about it, but decided to put it into its own posting.
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