Friday, August 18, 2006

Photographing three sleepy bees


Sunflowers are a lot of fun to take pictures of. You can play with them in so many ways - up against the blue sky, as in my previous post, or really close up.

The other morning I saw three bees snoozing in a sunflower. They had arranged themselves neatly side by side and they looked so sweet that I just had to photograph them.

Unfortunately, it was getting a bit late for morning shooting. A breeze had started up and the sunflower was moving around too much. I knew I had to use a macro lens with an extension tube to capture any detail in the bees, and that nothing would be sharp with all that movement.

Using a flash is not one of my strengths - in my experience flash ruins most pictures - but this was definitely a time to use it. Without it there was no way of getting the shot.

Generally flash blows out all the detail, so I dialed back the flash power using the flash compensation control, and the shot worked out very well.

The beauty of digital cameras is that you can take the shot, review it and then dial in some flash or exposure compensation.

Before digital, you had to be very experienced and knowlegable about flash to get a shot like this one right. With digital, you still have to know how to make exposure corrections, but being able to see the results right away makes it so much easier.

No wonder I'll never go back to slides.

2 comments:

  1. Aww... how cute! Great pic, by the way.

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  2. Yvonne nice to see that some one else takes notice of the bees at work or snoozing!Sunflowers I have a vase filled on my desk ..happy flowers I call them! See my silver wing post.. NG.

    ReplyDelete

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