I mean I can actually see the bee’s knees!
Wait….do bees even have knees? Where’s an Entomologist when you need one?
Anyway, this week my daughter and I have been on ‘Bee Watch’. Now our garden is in full bloom we luckily have lots of regular bee visitors, especially to the lavender. So Daisy and I spent a lovely sunny Sunday in the garden and every time she spotted a bee, she shouted to me (you know, the deafening cry of a 5-year-old, the one the rest of the street can hear) and I grabbed my camera.
For the child that cannot see her shoes when I have placed them neatly in front of her, this was a surprisingly successful strategy. Here’s what we captured:
I honestly can’t believe these two shots (above and below). I love them; the clarity, the detail and against the beautiful purple of the lavender. I was chuffed with these, to say the least. The level of detail I’m able to capture now, on my new camera is incredible. These two shots were taken with a standard 50mm lens!
We had a different bee friend on our Sweet Peas, the fuchsia pink serves as a wonderful background for this little bee going about its pollination work.
I wanted to include a shot that wasn’t a close-up. I love the lines and shapes created by the lavender stems on the right-hand side of this one.
On this last one, I changed the angle of the image when cropping it, creating an arch effect. I think this can work really well when you have a single subject with little else in the background. It draws your eye across the picture and just makes it a little bit more interesting.
I haven’t done much ‘small’ nature photography before, it was quite exciting and very challenging, trying to capture tiny constantly moving targets. I also really enjoyed the post production work because shooting insects on a 50mm lens means you can’t actually see how good the shot is until you zoom in quite drastically. Many of the images, as I expected were quite blurry but there were enough good ones to make it worthwhile.
We will be hunting for more small things in the garden this weekend too. Who knows what we might find!
Until next time.
M
[Cannon 700D with standard 50mm lens. Some shots were taken using the Macro setting and the rest were taken using the Aperture Priority (AV) mode]
#PointShoot