More bees!

As always the bees are loving the dahlias and I think the other flower is lamb's ears. These aren't quite macro shots, but getting there. I always think the bees are giving me the eye, wondering if I'm going to do something to them. Not at all, little bees.

This dahlia is open now and it's just lovely. I'm just completely captured by the yellows and orangey reds. I could photo it all day. I hope I get a chance a backlit shot while this is in bloom.

Ok Susi, warn the people around you

So my dear friend Susi has recently had a thing about bee bums. Sure, they're kind of cute, but I find their little faces so much more photogenic, and a much more difficult target.

There were a few of them posted for Susi here, if you missed them.

Here's another couple more of them. Now, Susi, before you scroll down to the second one, warn your neighbours to don the appropriate hearing protection. You might want to tape up your windows to prevent them from shattering.

I'm not kidding Susi, prepare yourself. Prepare those around you.

Spacer. Not sure if she reads on a laptop or what.

More spacer. Maybe I should put something else in.

Maybe I will.

Here's a lovely peony for you. Just to build the suspense.

And ta-da!

Now I need to worry about the bee pervert police showing up for taking naughty photos.

Bee bokeh white

There, a title that tells you everything that you're going to get in today's blog.

This bee really liked the Columbine, working it over and over. Good thing, as it took about 60 shots to get one I liked.

Here's another where I saw the shot and it worked out the way I had hoped, though it took a bit of tweaking in Lightroom.

And your white peony of the day.

Oh, and in answer to a question my faithful reader SPD asked, I've had one go at focus stacking, and might come back to it, but there are other things I'd rather work on.

What goes with peonies?

Ants! If you want macro shots of ants, setting up on any random peony bulb with good light is all you need to do.

I got this little guy by accident. This is the remnants of a clematis bloom about 7 feet off the ground. The idea was to capture the silky strands, but the ant stole the show.

I've got a bunch of white peony photos happening, since it's putting on a great show just now. I might be late for work tomorrow, getting some more sunrise shots. Here's one example just to whet your appetite. Yes, there's an ant in there.

The red one has some blossom action happening as well, but this is for the ant. You might need to look for it.

Don't ask

This one is from tonight, with a bee and an ant working hard on an allium. I didn't see the ant and was trying to capture the bee as it buzzed around doing it's bee business. The mint is almost blooming and the bees are checking it out already. I'll try for more shots of them, and then I'll be as ready as I'll ever be to capture dragonflies.

In upcoming news, I'll be doing a shoot for the community association family fun day, and the Wild Rose Triathlon. I've some buddies in that so I was going anyway, I'll just take more photos.

Here's a different ant species for you. Lots of photos to capture this one. I think it was tussling with the ant that is out of focus underneath the leaf.

The first bee photos of 2018, flying even!

Bees are a challenge. They're always moving, and their weight moves the flowers. Plus the wind. Plus trying to get the focus and everything else right. I was out to capture the yellow Iris, and while I was practicing on the big clematis blossom, a bee flew in. I chased him for a bit, and got these. Not perfect yet, but I'm out of practice.

I have begun to dither happily over image of the month. My plan is to sleep in Saturday, and then over coffee in a leisurely way, consider my choices. A few people have let me know the one(s) they liked, thank you very much! It's not too late, feel free to check them out and tell me which you'd like to buy in a huge print. I mean, which appeals to you most.

Pushing through

The little plants are growing fast, reaching for the sun, pushing winter debris aside. It makes for some  interesting juxtapositions. Plus the first insect of the year. A ladybug emerged from under some debris while I was watching. I double checked to make sure it wasn't an early lily beetle.

My buddy Julie posted something thoughtful on Facebook about her experience with social assistance  some years ago. She described how humiliating it was, and how it made her feel like a loser, which she totally isn't, but the system didn't know that.

There's lots of reasons why people might need social assistance. Sometimes all it takes is a little bad luck when you don't have much to fall back on. Maybe it was a bad decision that seemed like a good idea at the time. Or you might just be starting out, pushing through adversity, hoping it's a leaf and not a huge rock that gets dropped on you.

Once again I'm struck by how much plants can look like predators, mouths gaping...

This is my favourite of today's batch. The one plant looks like it's wearing a little crown, and the others are peering out, wondering if it's safe.

Hello little ladybug!

This is the lawn just now. I know, yuck!

August Image of the Month

The choice for Image of the Month was easy this time. Here I thought I'd be agonizing over these two images, both taken the same day early in the month, and getting great reviews all the way along.

I had got lucky and found the light for another try at the red begonia, and managed to bring up a bit more of the texture in the petals and played with the contrast a bit. It's similar to the earlier, softer image that I liked so much last month. Poor begonia, always a bridesmaid, and yet I might get this one printed. There's a space just to my right where a 6' x 4' print would fit nicely.

Yes, it's been a smokey month in Calgary and all the photographers are sick of it.

Then there were about a dozen other images throughout the month that I thought were quite striking, but didn't quite displace either of those first two. I burn to show them to you, but I think all are on the blog throughout the month. Finding them is left as an exercise for the student.

Then on the same day, again, near the end of the month I got this, totally by accident. I didn't even see the bee while composing the shot. And yet, there it is, perfectly spaced between the sunflowers, and showing off it's wings. This one is already cropped in a bit, and one of the people at the beers and camera event last night suggested cropping in on it more to focus on the bee and just a bit of the sunflowers.

And here we are at the image of the month. This at least is my intended shot, but there is an element of luck involved. As you probably guessed, I'm using my new macro lens that I've been burbling about all month, at about 3x magnification, HAND HELD. The reason I say there is an element of luck is that the depth of field is so shallow that it's really difficult to hold the camera still, at exactly the right distance from the subject. That right distance is about a mm forward or back, which is why macro shots usually have the camera on macro rails which are mounted on a tripod. This image is not cropped. For both these last two, embiggen and enjoy.

I think Mr. Travis Bee (You talking to me?) would look stunning in a big print, but I can see where that eye might make some people nervous.

You might have missed yesterday's blog where I mentioned going to the beers and camera event that the Camera Store puts on. This was my first one and I had fun. I wasn't out do do serious evening and night photography, so I played with the settings and tried for some motion blur shots. I haven't done much of that, and it turned out ok.

But I want to burble about becoming a better photographer. There are sort of two branches of this. One branch is people using whatever camera and lenses they have and learning to take better pictures, often yearning for better equipment.  The other branch is people using cameras that some people would think are technically obsolete, or out of the mainstream. Several were shooting film. (Film is, is, oh heck, google it for yourself.) There were a few medium format cameras there. I saw one Leicia M that I suspect is north of $10K if you include the lens.

But for that second group, the idea isn't to get an image of something and run to the next one. They are usually more about the process, taking the time to compose their shot, knowing that the results they get will be subtly different that what I would get with my basic camera. I chatted with one guy using a twin lens reflex camera, though I forget which brand. He had grown up with film, went to digital for a while, but then realized he wasn't having as much fun, and wasn't getting images he liked as much as the film. So he sold the digital equipment and bought really nice film equipment. As he put it, "I got it for a song and a smile." And he's happy.

Lots of the photography books I've read talk about taking the time to think about the point of the photo, and taking the time to compose it. Not your kids playing of course, there isn't the time. But other images where you might be trying to create a particular look, or capture something deeper than the surface image. In the film days every shot cost time and money, so you had to think about it.

Now in the digital world you can fill up a camera chip with images as fast as you can press the shutter button, on the assumption that one of them will be right. Maybe so. I've done this, and scrolled through dozens (Hundreds? Thousands?) of images that weren't good. I'm trying to get into the habit of thinking about what I'm trying to do, figure out what settings will do that given the conditions, and seeing if it works. Then fine tuning. Then getting ruthless about passing over images that are ok, or almost right, in search of the 'Ah!' image.

Another part is using the camera every day. One guy was chatting about how he wasn't getting the results he wanted, until he started shooting every day. It almost didn't matter what the subject was; there so much to shoot without leaving the city, or even your own yard. He found his camera skills improved dramatically. He got better at seeing a shot, understanding where to be for it, what settings were needed, and physically operating the camera.

When I started I said I was going to try to post a photo every day on the blog, and I've pretty well done that. There are far more photos than days, of course. I've run nearly 29,000 photos through Lightroom, though of course nothing gets done with most of them. In case you've missed it, my best images are over on my photoblog, and I'm now trying to get in the habit of updating it every month or so.

I should probably go back from the beginning and examine the old photos with my new standards, deleting liberally. There are nearly 7,000 that I've edited, and many of them I've looked at, thinking about what works, and doesn't work for them.

Then I started thinking about what the best image was each month, and that's been even more interesting, figuring out which one, and why. Now as I'm shooting, I'm thinking about the bar that's been set, working to create new images that are as good, or better than the ones I've already done. It's fun!

Macro Monday 4

A bit of a mixed bag for you macro lovers here today, with a reward down at the bottom. These were taken at various times over the last week.

A neighbour hankers to have a photo of a sunflower up on his wall, so he bought some at the supermarket and dropped them off the other day. It was fun getting some regular shots of them, but the one I like the most, at least so far is this 3.5x shot. I'm not sure what those are tiny little beads of. (Though there was one in yesterday's blog that is even more amazing, since I didn't even know the bee was there till I saw the photo on the computer screen.)

Some fabric mesh at about 1.3x, using an extension tube on the 100 mm macro.

This is the heart of a tiny little Johnny Jump Up, at about 4.5 or 5x. Those little white tendrils are barely visible to the naked eye, showing up barely as a tiny little white patch.

Artemisia at about 4.5x. I sort of think of this as a baby lake kraken, dreaming of taking on wet suited  prey. This was kind of fun. The camera was stable, and I gradually focused in, seeing how it changed at different magnifications. This might be a good place to try focus stacking, though I've got some photos of the sunflower I want to try that with. Maybe later today, in between all the other stuff I want to do.

Settums at about 3.5x. It took a while to get focused in on one that was open.

White geranium, the barely visible stamen at about 4.5x.

The centre of an English Daisy looks sort of nubbly to the naked eye, but at 5x these remind me of the Alliums.

All of these (except the extension tube shot) are done with the camera on the macro rails, but the rails  themselves are sitting on the ground or something firm. I really do need to get a small, but stable tripod good for shooting things close to the surface. The camera, lens, and flash weighs just over 2 kilos. (Any suggestions from my photo buddies?) Free handholding this kind of weight when you need to be within a mm or so of the focus distance, and you're aiming at a spot that's only a few mm on a side is nearly impossible.

Although, there are exceptions when you get lucky. I did this Sunday morning as I was out scoping out the flowers, and getting ready to shoot the sunflowers. I think this guy was napping so it didn't notice or mind the lens in it's face. Taken at about 3x, no cropping, HANDHELD! This is almost certainly going to be my August image of the month, and is a strong contender for 2017 image of the year.

The other thing I was thinking of is seeing what I've got around the house to build an improvised thingie to mount the macro rails on, that allows the camera to be moved easily into any position, and itself mounts on something sturdy. The bike stand is a possibility. Any suggestions from the macro community?

Non-macro insect round up

These cosy up to the macro line in some cases, but I don't think cross over it. For the purposes of my blog going forward, if something is shot with the 100 mm lens by itself, it's not going to be considered a macro shot. If an extension tube is between the lens and camera, I'll call it a macro shot. And of course, it's a macro shot if it's the awesome 1-5x macro lens.

Sometimes a shot is so good I'll want to put it on the blog right away. Sometimes shots are pretty good, but what with one thing or another don't get added to the blog. In some cases I've got a series planned and I get a little distracted. (As a hint, stay tuned for the black lily.)

Or I'll have some good ones that go together, but I don't want to include others since they don't fit, though there isn't anything wrong with the shots. That's what this is, a round up of the various insect (mostly bees because there's so many of them) shots over the last little while that haven't made it into my blog. Since I don't have a system for looking at my folder of images and knowing for sure what's been used, I may repeat myself. How you suffer.

Sometimes when I'm out shooting flowers, I get lucky with insects. I think this first one is a fly. We were looking at that huge dent in the left eye, wondering if that's natural or otherwise.

I got this one a few days ago. The bees love the dahlias.

This moth was having a snooze, I think. I got some shots, then as I was moving to get in closer my shadow went across it, and it was gone. Note to self.

This bee didn't mind me clicking away.

Posing the good side.

I wonder sometimes what the bees think of us, if they even notice us as all. Here I am, plainly in view, but that doesn't get in the way of work.

Liftoff! Just as I clicked the shutter. I call a mostly in focus shot of a flying insect a success. Maybe one day I'll look back at this and sneer, but if that's the case, I'll be called the bee whisperer.

This was during one of the Fish Creek walks.

I alluded to these two shots a while ago. This little bee floating over the huge white poppy sort of reminded me of a little spaceship cruising around looking for a landing spot.

Another flying bee. A slightly distant shot but I liked the composition, and the bee is slightly out of focus so I didn't want to crop in.

Shortly after these two shots another bee joined in, and they made a spectacle of themselves. That shot shows up in this post, and I'm sorry, but you'll have to deal with a couple shots of Curtis first.