CalevPhoto

Flies as pollinators

All of us are very familiar with the service that bees perform for us in our yards.  Many of us are also familiar that there are a great number of other things that also pollinate flowers – such as some species of bats.  In the past I have read that some flies also pollinate flowers, but it certainly was strange actually seeing one do it.

I found a number of these flies on a bank of yellow flowers next to a small stream.  I must admit that even after attempting to look it up, I have no idea what type of fly it is.  At first I thought it was a face fly, but according to what I read face flies are quite a bit bigger than this one.

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Playing with flowers

OK, I promise that I’ll get back to some good old fashioned bugs soon, but I thought I would post some more flowers.  Last weekend at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens I played around with daisies.  I took all of these shots with my 180L but without a tripod.  Instead I used my MT-24EX mounted on a Wimberley macro flash bracket.  I would like to say that a great deal of creative thought went into this decision – but the truth is I was too lazy to get the tripod out and spend a lot of time getting the position right.

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Experimenting with Photoshop and flowers

Recently I have started listening to the photo critiques at RadiantVista.  For those of you not familiar with this site, it is an excellent source of information and composition and Photoshop and on top of that it is free.  Currently my use of Photoshop is limited to changing contrast/shadows and converting from RAW to JPG.  Recently I took one of my flower shots and tried to see what I could do with it.  Here’s the original shot – unmodified from the camera.

This is clearly only an average shot, but the main purpose was to play around with Photoshop and see how I could improve it.

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Trying my hand at flowers

While taking pictures of insects yesterday at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, I noticed that they had lots of pretty things on the plants that sometimes the bugs would crawl on.  As most of you know, I spend most of my macro efforts taking pictures of insects, but the major reason for that until recently has been the fact that the MP-E 65 isn’t the greatest lens for flowers.  Many flowers do not need 1:1 magnification so the MP-E 65 was often too close.  This is not the case with the 180L.  Therefore I put away my flash and took out my tripod and attempted a few flower shots.

This is a cranesbill flower, related to geraniums.  The interesting thing when taking this picture was I had the opportunity to use a rather shallow depth of field.  I kind of like the effect here.  One can still make out the leaves but the stem is not visible.  I could blur the leaves more in Photoshop, but I rather like the effect out of the camera.  I took this at f/5 – which I wouldn’t dare think of for most insects.

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Stalking bees in the garden

Those of you who know me will find it very odd that I actually attempted to get some shots of bees the other day.  Even more shocking is that I went with my MP-E 65 instead of the 180L- which is what I normally use when stalking bees.  The thing is, I am absolutely terrified of things with wings and stingers.  However, I am beginning to warm up to bees and I have found that they generally don’t mind me taking their picture while they are busy gathering pollen.

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Playing with bugs on flowers

This weekend I finally found the chance to get out and take some pictures, as Saturday was a very nice day.  I wandered around in my backyard for awhile, looking in the normal places, and found nothing that I hadn’t photographed several times already.  The shoot was briefly interrupted as Eitan, Nathan, and I looked for ants that we could put in their ant farm.  They were very into it but the ants we wound up using turned out to be too small as they later escaped.  We found one bigger ant, but since we couldn’t find any friends for him we let him go in place of the smaller and more plentiful ones.

After satisfying the kids’ ant curiosity, I began to think about choosing better backgrounds for some of the insects.  As we have a number of flowers in bloom, I decided to try that out.  My first subject was an earwig that I found.

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