Sometimes being a good photographer is just being open to the possibility of a photograph. I was out wandering around one day, just exploring wonderful Vancouver Island and I had taken my camera with me. I stumbled on to a beautiful spot called Moorecroft Regional Park that has a great bench sitting on a spit of land with a bay on either side and the Georgia Straight out in front of you. It was so peaceful and beautiful, the sun was just warm enough to make the breeze a wonderful cool counterpoint and I noticed that there where bees everywhere harvesting food from the yellow flowers all around me. When you are interested in doing macro photography many times a small point and shoot will do a wonderful job. The small lens and small sensor combine to give a very short minimum focusing distance. My Fuji X10 is always with me in my purse so I pulled it out and began to try and get really close. The challenge here is to get close enough that you can get the bee to fill the frame and then to keep things in focus. When you are this close even very small movements of the camera can throw your subject out of focus. So I would lock focus on the flower, wait for the bee to do something interesting, try and hold very still, then press the shutter. I did get stung once. If you are struggling with focus you can shut down your aperture, giving you a deeper field of focus but I really wanted the other flowers in the background to blur out so that they wouldn’t be distracting. The shot above is my favourite but I did get a couple of other interesting ones below.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

In my next post I will discuss some of the challenges of photographing bees in flight.

I especially liked the dynamic background that I had for this macro shot.