Bees In Flight

As I explained in my last post I was working hard to catch bees in an interesting pose in the flowers when I decided to set a more difficult challenge for myself.  I wanted to see if I could catch a bee in flight.  I decided to start with them on the flowers because then I would have a reference point to lock my focus on.  The problem is that bees take off really quickly and if you are going to get a picture where you can see any detail you have to get really close so they fly out of frame very quickly.  There were no bees at all in my first 10 pictures because they had flown out of frame before I could react and press the button.  I began to watch them more closely and noticed that they would generally rub their front legs together in a particular way before they took off.  This little warning combined with the realization that I would have to frame the shot a little wider and depend partially on cropping to get a closeup shot meant that I got some decent shots.  It was still really difficult to keep the bees in focus because they never flew straight up from the flower so they were often flying out of the plain of focus.  I tried to deal with this by stopping down my aperture and it helped but the bees are still not really sharp.  The other thing that I really like about this photograph, as opposed to the other two below is the fact that there is such a strong sense of place.  The background, while blurred enough to not be distracting, helps us understand where we are and makes the bee seem bigger. 

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Bee spots me as he comes in for a landing.

Bees lifting off from a flower.

To Look A Bee In The Eye

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.

A more traditional macro insect shot.

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Vandal

There is a section of downtown Tacoma that is a haven for graffiti artists.  My wife and I were wandering around the area on a sleepy Sunday morning when we stumbled across a parking garage that was completely empty except for a painter going to work on the interior.   Every wall of the garage was covered in graffiti and deep in the interior was this guy working away on a new piece.  I took some pictures of the pieces nearer the entry and then moved closer to where he was working.  I watched him paint for a while and then asked if I could film him for a while.  He said yes and he became part of a short video that I made about the artists I encountered on the trip.  We talked a bit and he told me that the owner of the garage let them paint on the interior of the garage on Sundays when there were no cars around.  I asked if I could do a portrait of him and he agreed to stand in front of one of his pieces but he wanted to keep his mask on.  He leaned up against the wall and I got the image below.  I liked the contrast of the bright colours with his monochromatic clothing and the way that the light filters across the image from the left.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Purple Tracks

During the summer time we were in Vernon for a weekend and I had seen an old barn with some character that I wanted to photograph at sunset.  The nearby hills cast the barn into shadow so I kept driving around looking for an interesting subject.  The light is everything.  If I had taken this picture at 2 in the afternoon I would have gotten washed out greens, a flat boring railroad track and some very grey rocks.  The light cutting down through all of that horizon in the evening makes the green and yellow come together in a fiery gold, the low slanting light hits the tracks and produces a reflection that pulls your eye into the photo.  The tracks also put the rocks into a light shadow allowing them to display their purple-blue colour.  When photographers go out at sunset or sunrise good things happen.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Sun

I hurried out to Neck Point on a May evening to catch the sunset.  I hurried around to a position so that I would be looking west over the water and discovered that I had a very striking background to a silhouette of some people who had also come out to watch the same sunset.  I snapped off a few quick ones and saw that the atmospheric conditions were giving a beautiful golden yellow glow to my pictures.  I began to watch for an interesting foreground moment with the people who were out in front watching the sun go down.  I was a long ways back so I wasn’t worried about them seeing me losing the natural body language of the moment but there was a sign in the way that kept getting into the frame.  I shifted around and finally the people moved off to the left.  I took quite a few pictures but there were two other moments that I really liked; the man and woman in the frame above sat at a picnic table and she leaned in towards him, (left), I really liked the body language in that moment.  The other one was of a group of younger people; they were standing and talking and watching and the sun caught very nicely in their hair, (bottom left).  In the end I liked the hopeful nature of the man standing, putting both his hands over his eyes and staring out into the sunset and the counterbalance on the left side of the frame that the silhouette of the tree provides.  The last element that really made the decision for me was the fact that I had closed down my aperture and produced a depth of field that produced a sharp foreground and maintained focus on the sunset.  The photo is really about the sun so having it dominate was pretty important.  A few minutes later I got a non-silhouetted image of two people watching the sunset, and, each other.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com