A Moments Rest

Posted on September 2, 2010 under Fine Art, Natures Detail, Photography | 30 Views

The sun falls across a hover fly taking a rest on the petal of a black eyed susan yellow flower

I talked on Tuesday about my recent visit to the Japanese Gardens when I posted the first image from that trip, a yellow flower which I now know is called a “Black Eyed Susan” thanks to @ShebaJo over on Twitter.

I mentioned during that last post that there was a riot of colour with many flowers in bloom, as well as many Bee’s and Butterflies busying themselves also. What I forgot to mention was there were also a few hover flys buzzing about too.  And here we have one of those Hover Flies resting on a Black Eyed Susan.

For this image I managed to crank the aperature up to f/8 which gave me a whoping 3.1mm of depth of field at macro distances. Trying to use auto-focus at these distances with fast moving objects is pointless. Instead I will switch to manual focus, get my composition right and fire off a series of shots. I’ll then check the LCD to see if any of the series are acceptably sharp. Then recompose and start again until I am happy I have the image I am looking for, or the subject has moved on. This is the polar opposite to my aproach to landscapes which is far more restrained and methodical. For instance I returned home from this day out, about 4 hours with 179 images while for a typical landscape shoot I would have taken just 20 images for the same period of time.

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM
Exposure: 1/160
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 100mm
ISO Speed: 200

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