1/160th of a sec | f/10 | 100mm | ISO 160

While I was washing my car on Sunday, I noticed that the bees are out in full force in the bushes in my front yard. It sounds like a beehive in 2 of my bushes, with mostly honey bees, a couple of bumble bees, and even some wasps getting in the mix. After I was done with the cleaning, I grabbed my camera and started shooting.

1/500th of a sec | f/3.5 | 100mm | ISO 200

At f/3.5 in the photo of the bumblebee directly above, you can see how small the plane of perceived focus is. I hand-held the shots of the bumble bees because they moved so quickly and rarely stayed still long enough to get a sharp picture with a slower shutter speed/smaller aperture setup that I had to use a fast shutter speed and large aperture to get a properly exposed sharp image. I used my Tokina 100mm macro lens. Even though the lens can shoot at f/2.8, typically when shooting something like this, it’s best to use a smaller aperture. Since it’s a 100mm prime lens, some amount of bokeh will be present at even the highest f number (smallest aperture). In order to get more of the honey bees in focus, such as the shot at the top of the post, I needed to rely on my tripod.

I set the tripod up very close to the subjects, composed the image of the flowering parts of the bushes, grabbed my ML-L3 remote, and waited. A little patience and sooner or later a bee would come along and start gathering pollen. Prior to grabbing my remote, I was trying to stand behind the camera and manually fire the shutter. Besides being a bit nerve-wracking, I noticed that the bees all seemed to have moved to the other side of the bush while I was standing there. I guess they were more intimidated by me than I was by them. After I stood back a bit and used the remote, they came right back to the front of the bush again.

Much like shooting the hummingbirds in my front yard, the key ingredient is patience. If you can allow yourself to slow down enough to wait out shots like this, the reward is much more than just a cool picture, it really is a zen-like experience.