Quote:
Originally Posted by blueflames50
hubby and I went on a trek through a 148 acre fruit orchard attempting to photograph bees in flowers and in flight....the smell of apple/peach and blueberry blossoms was intoxicating...catching good shots of fast moving elusive bees was interesting to say the least!
managed to get 2 bees in this shot
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heres a tip we use : to catch nice sharp pictures of insects in flight requires very very fast shutter speeds. far faster than you can typically get by just clicking away.
marilyn and i use a technique using flash to control the exposure and not use the camera shutter which is to slow.
the flash can fire up to 1/10,000 of a second which is fast enough to freeze anything but the trick is making the flash the dominant source of light in broad daylight.
this is how we do it with a nikon system, i cant speak for cannon as im not familiar with that flash system. the nikon system uses 2 independant exposure systems in ttl that can be adjusted independent of each other. the camera controls the background exposure and the flash the subject exposure. they are totaly isolated from each other. not sure how cannon does it.
so:
put the camera in manual mode, flash in ttl mode. if using nikon dont use ttl-bl, use ttl.
go to iso 400, set a speed of about 1/200 but dont exceed your cameras max flash sync speed which is a spec given in your camera documentation and try an aperture of about f/11
LEAVE THE FLASH OFF,DONT TURN IT ON YET , take some test shots and keep adjusting the aperture until the photo is very dark. usually f11 to f16 is the range.
at that point turn the flash on and adjust the flash exposure on the back of the flash to throw a nice well exposed light over the flower.
thats it!.. now the camera will expose the background dark while the flash exposes the bee freezing it in space with superfast light.
you can control the look of the background by adjusting the aperture ranging it from having your bee against a black background to full brightness in the background. you decide how you want the background to look.
thats one reason to learn to shoot manual as you cant duplicate that in program or auto mode. you can see how the background was darkened to taste in the last shot.
once you get the hang of it you can easily freeze anything in flight sharp as a tack.
http://mm-photography.smugmug.com/Other/CLARKS-BOTANICAL/DSC4598/908350434_CWe6F-L.jpg (broken link)
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