Study - Work in Progress - Bees! (RF100 macro)

[homebodyMacro]

Bees! R5II w/ RF100 macro

They like the violet wood sorrels a lot - but in spring they'll have more targets to work with. There were some huge bees last year on the wisteria - I only had my R8 for maybe a month at that point, had just gotten the RF 100 macro, and generally had no idea what I was doing since the R8 was my first foray... Hoping for the big fellows to be back this year.

For some shots this week chasing these around, I used a custom AF mode with +1 sensitivity and accel/decel. It seems to work better than auto, but AF still struggles with these bugs. They move extremely fast when viewed so closely - plenty of motion visible on appendages in most 1/1000 shots I took.

Trying to get max. magnification on these really gives you appreciation for the meaning of "busy bees". They fly, land, dive into these flowers, pop out, and leave sometimes in a second or two. One thing I quite like about photography is just observing things as they are.

I got some extremely close shots here - you could print poster-sized bees with some of them, so I'm happy with the relatively brief effort.









Swan dive, perfect 10

 

[homebodyMacro]

More bees!





Stunt bee loading itself into a cannon

 

[homebodyMacro]

More bees! The violet wood sorrels will die off soon, so I got some more shots. Quite happy with many of these! It was windy and I barely had a single second on any of them - had to shoot with LCD that I could barely see, not get too close and blow the MFD, and fire once I saw autofocus engage (pre-capture helped with reaction time as well as they would be flying away by the time all those assessments could register visually/mentally).

I have been using a custom R5II AF mode - manual, +1 on both of the 2 settings. Seems to work well overall considering animal mode isn't really trained on bugs as far as I know.

Settings: 1/1000 or faster is needed to get sharp 1x+ magnification shots - bees move very quickly. f/7.1 or thereabouts is best to get a reasonable DOF. The ISO is in the 1000-3000 range, which is about as high as I'd like without losing too much detail. Overall these seem pretty optimal given the variable lighting constraint outdoors. I think the results are quite good.

Anyways, as before these are with the R5II + RF 100 macro.









Takeoff shots:





Wing detail



Sneaky



Last one

 

[R2D2]

Love the colors! Thanks for posting these. We've been getting hit with snowstorm after snowstorm here in the Midwest (US) :-(

Indeed, very hard to shoot! I nickname these "Crazy Bees!" I like to use Focus Bracketing and then pick the best focal plane (usually the eye).

Have fun while you got 'em! :-D

R2

 

[homebodyMacro]

Love the colors! Thanks for posting these. We've been getting hit with snowstorm after snowstorm here in the Midwest (US) :-(

Indeed, very hard to shoot! I nickname these "Crazy Bees!" I like to use Focus Bracketing and then pick the best focal plane (usually the eye).

Have fun while you got 'em! :-D

R2

Thanks R2! That means a lot.

The sorrels have quite a lovely purple color, and the bees are a nice complement to them. And the green grass/sorrel leaf blur as well.

You know, I've had that thought before - just shooting a bracket and then picking the plane like that. I'll have to give it a try... I'm not sure what the firing rate is with bracketing - I want to say it drops it a decent bit from 30fps, though maybe I'm mistaken. All things considered, the AF got the eye on many of the bees I shot despite having probably less than a second for many of them. It has been surprisingly good overall, especially with the custom mode +1/+1 setting on animal mode. The AF does struggle some of course, but in doing so it practically does a focus bracket on its on.

The honey bees will be around a lot of the time I think - I'm in Texas, and it is mostly very warm. I have some wild Lantana in back that flowers year-round... I think the bees more or less always have some interest in it. Certainly the sorrels are a nice way to capture the bees though.

I'm hoping for a big wisteria bloom - that attracted some enormous bees last year (some all black/iridescent - they were very cool), I hope it happens again. We just had a small bloom, but on my side of the fence (it straddles a fence w/ neighbor) it was right behind our shed and a bit hard to photograph (still got some good ones, I'll post them separately).

 

[homebodyMacro]

Slightly refined version of my favorite shot from the last post - maybe my favorite overall bee shot: