Health issues have kept me close to home over the last week and a bit, however my camera hardly ever sits still. Continuing on from my article in CameraTalk, I have moved on to the challenge of capturing the bumblebees in flight. A friend of mine has been consistently capturing the bumblebees in flight for many weeks now when she visits, while I have mainly concentrated on close-ups. Time for me to step it up and take flight!
That would be too easy on it’s own, so how about going one step further. Lets try to two bumblebees in flight in the one image. Again challenge accepted. I took note of how my friend had been placing herself to the side of the flower and did the same. Then it was a case of sitting and waiting…
It took all of ten minutes waiting before we were both capturing two bumblebees in a single capture. In the image above, the second bumblebee succeeded in pulling the other one off the flower and taking its place. We watched this happening multiple times. These bees take their jobs as pollinators seriously.
Concentrating on capturing the bumblebees in flight, I was both surprised and happy to get more than one in the shot. I kept my ISO setting up extremely high to allow for a really fast shutter speed. Bumblebees are very quick, if you blink you miss them. I was also using the pre-burst function on my camera at 20fps continual. This is very similar to how I photograph fast flying birds like kingfishers.
Being side on to the flower, was the ability to get a lovely soft background so the bumblebee isn’t competing with anything else in the image. The flowers and colours in the background are soft enough that they do not detract from either the flower or the bumblebee in flight
This last image is here to show off the amount of pollen the bumblebee will carry with it when flying. There is a full sack on both sides. Hopefully I will be able to get out and about with the camera again soon and give you all a break from the bumblebees. As always feedback is welcomed here, and thank you all so much for your lovely comments from the last post.