My Camera is full of Bees!

[foxgrrl]

©2006 Julia Vixen <juliavixen→gmail.com>

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
hollow_hope helped me in taking some of these photos.

Comments

[girlvinyl.livejournal.com]

WOW!

[ivy]

Those are really fantastic -- I love the color, and the detail. How do you even go about taking shots like these?

[roadknight.livejournal.com]

Very nice...I've got pix of Dragonflies like that.
I'll send a link to them

[foxgrrl]

I had just picked up hollow_hope from the airport, and had stopped by my office to introduce him to some coworkers. Then I dropped him off at his aunt's place in Los Altos. There was a natural spring in the driveway, and a croaking frog which got my attention. I couldn't find the frog, But on the tour of the back-yard, I noticed lots of bees, everywhere.

I have been wanting to take some pictures of bees for a while, but never had the time. I was also exhausted and wanted to sleep, and I had to go back to work too. But I started taking pictures instead.

Most of my close-up (macroscopic) work is done with either my Nikon DX AF-S NIKKOR 18-55mm 1:3.5-5.6G ED, mounted backwards on my D50. (Sometimes I use my 50mm f1.8 Nikkor, or my 28mm with the broken iris spring, but I gave that to glitterychaos so that she could do similar macroscopic work easily.) The "G" series lenses are a little bit tricky to use in this way, because there is no aperture setting ring. However, as I prefer to shoot everything close-up at f22^* anyway.

A few months ago, I also got an old (1960's vintage?) 105mm Micro-NIKKOR 1:2.8, which can reach about 1:1 scale. The reversed 18mm will do about 4:1 scale. But it's a lot easier to use. I see some diffraction problems with it too. Back when I was still shooting 35mm E-6 film, I used to use a 70-210mm telephoto lens, with a set of +1, +2, and +4 diopter close-up lenses. This setup has a terrible problem with coma/diffusion, and I could only really use it (get clear pictures) at f32. I thought that this was a problem with the design of the lens itself, but with these bees, I tried out the old +1,+2,+4 diopter lenses on my new AF-S NIKKOR 55-200mm 1:4-5.6G ED lens, and I had the same problems with diffusion. (I took a bunch of "psychic aura" pictures as a result of this setup, I'll post an example later...)

So, for the bee pictures above, The ones that are really close-up, and have black backgrounds, were done with the reversed 18-55mm lens at the smallest aperture, and off-camera flash. The one with the bee flying, I can't remember if that was the reversed 55mm, or the 105mm micro lens. I was basically pointing the camera into the sun for enough light to backlight the bee, and I think that I also opened the aperture up a bit. (And blinding myself for the art.) The one with the bee, and the well-lit blurred background, was I think the 105mm micro lens at f2.8, and the film speed set to ISO1600 (hence the chromatic noise) shot with natural light.

All photos done hand-held. The bees never stand still, not even for a second. I missed a lot of great photos by like 0.3 seconds. One of the really annoying things about the Nikon D50, is that the distance to the viewfinder prism, and the CCD sensor, is slightly different. In normal usage, you'd never notice that your focal plane had shifted by half a centimeter. But in macroscopic work, it screws everything up. And I wasn't compensating for it here, like I usually do. So all of these photos are slightly out of focus. (I need to, when looking through the viewfinder, focus slightly in front of the subject matter, not on the subject directly.)

The Nikon D50 has 12-bits of dynamic range on each color channel (36-bits total for RGB) on about 6.1 million pixels, and rather low-noise. I squish this down into the 24-bit sRGB colorspace with ufraw (dcraw front-end for the gimp) sometimes increasing the exposure by an f-stop or two, and brightening the mid-range values. I shoot everything at ISO200 in Raw format whenever possible. (Light permitting)

There was also a humming bird hovering right next to me for a minute, but I couldn't take a photo of it without changing lenses, which would probably have scared it off. I've been wanting to get a good photo of a humming bird for a while too. When hollow_hope came out to see what I was doing, I had him hold my flash up, that made my life so much easier – you really need three hands to do this. He also took a bunch of photos too, not shown above.


Footnote: I haven't actually done the math yet to calculate what the aperture value really is when the lens is reversed like this.

[cogitate.livejournal.com]

cool pictures... Gotta love macro stuff :)

[ivy]

Neat; thank you for all the information, even if I only understood about half of it. [grin] The results are really just stunning.

[oygevalte.livejournal.com]

I should compare your dcraw results with mine from Capture One DSLR. I really like the image quality, NR, and organization system, as well as the easy ability to copy settings in infinitely-configurable ways between photos.

I've often thought of doing macro work, but I no longer have a worthwhile rig (at least for now), and I have such a huge backlog of images to process as it is, I shouldn't tempt myself to create even more work for myself. ;)

Let me know if you want to talk Photoshop sometime. I gather you're not much of a Winders person (and who can blame you?), but I can get some really nice results in PS, courtesy of some pro classes I took a while back.