Busy Bee

Today, I went to a local garden during lunch to find some things to shoot. My original goal was to blip some flowers, but I saw some of these massive bumble bees flying around and decided to try my luck with them. The problem was that they were rather impatient and rested very briefly on flowers. I had a very limited time to focus compose and shoot and ended up standing in one place and pivoting around whenever one appeared.

This shot is the best of the bunch. I had to crop because the distance between me and this guy was further then I would have liked. The limited light and hand held nature meant that I had to up the ISO to 800 to get a reasonable shutter speed.

After this experience, I wonder how anyone can capture a bug in mid-air. You must need either incredible high ISO performance or a bright day. The other thing issue is how you effectively focus on it. I tried auto-focus and ended up preferring manual to prevent the focus from hunting due to the small size of these guys.

On final off topic note, I happen to use Twitter and someone posted a link to some really funny pictures. The interesting thing is that this is an example of not just great humor, but also really interesting photography. Check it out: What do Stormtroopers do on their day off


Post Processing:
None, this straight from the camera

Constructive criticism always welcome