Andrew Parsons Foreign Exchange Student at large

There’s just something about the little things in life. I love macro-photography; I love capturing the little details of our world and saving them as a still picture. Naturally this photographic interest has extended into taking photographs of garden insects as they go about their daily business.

Bees. Bumblebees. They’ve proved to be a challenging adversary for me, the novice photographer. They are certainly not elusive, but photographing them has been an ongoing exercise in learning the real world results of adjusting shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and focal length.

Taking pictures of bees isn’t difficult at all when they are preoccupied.

Easy as pie

Unfortunately, it is when they are flying that the photography becomes quite difficult.

I have hundreds of photos of blurred bees. Quickly I learned that shutter speed is oh-so-very-important with this venture.

Unfortunately, increasing shutter speed to, let’s say, 1/4000 of a second, like in the image below, results in very dark images. The image below shows up black on my monitor, and it wasn’t until I did a quick fix in GIMP (Color>Auto>Normalize) that the bee became visable.

But dark images really aren’t acceptable. And so it became my quest to snap a perfect picture, like above, but in decent light.