My garden is in full bloom right now with all sorts of different colourful flowers. Along with the flowers, there are many bees and bumblebees buzzing about. When the birds are scarce, I often turn my attention to the bees instead. I have never really explored macro photography and while I do own a macro lens, I have never used it – maybe one day. My birding lens is a large zoom that allows me to get really close to the birds, so I figured it should also work for the bees. Challenge accepted!
Challenge One: Get in really close
The flowers were low and me being unable to get down low enough, I had a bit of a problem. I resorted to scooting around on my office chair up and down the driveway alongside the garden and I am sure my neighbours must think I am completely nuts. My lens at full extension has a macro feature, I started to experiment with distance inching a little closer bit by bit.
Keep in mind that at full extension my micro-four-thirds 100-400mm lens effectively gives me 200-800mm equivalent. It will focus from 1.3 metres. Ok that’s the technical bit over, keep reading.
Having a great deal of fun, I inched my way closer and closer to the bees, until the lens refused to focus at around 1.3 meters. Imagine looking through the lens at 800mm to a subject that is only 1.3 metres away. Suddenly the tiny little bee looks massive! My next challenge is to track the bee flying and moving from bloom to bloom. I am still working on this as it is more about my eye following movement to give the camera something to track. I have had some recent success with this but I still don’t react as fast as I would like to.
Challenge Two: Tracking a moving bumblebee
I understand there will be many people out there wanting to tell me there is an easier way, but that isn’t what this post is all about. It is about presenting myself with a challenge using only the equipment that I have in my hand to achieve something completely different to what I normally use it for, while still using my birding techniques and settings. I believe that each time I do this I learn something new about my camera and my lens.
This current challenge is fast becoming a new obsession for bees and bumblebees. I recommend finding similar challenges yourselves as they become learning experiences and assist with our growth and improvement with our photography.
This post was written some time ago and was first published in the PSNZ CameraTalk e-zine where it was called “Lets talk about the birds and the bees”. I have done a bit of a rewrite to bring it up to date. I welcome comments and feedback, you can send it using my contact form here.