A couple of bumblebees

Moodyville-ain · Oct 1, 2009

At fist I was a little anxious, but I dont think he really cared I was there, as long as I didnt get between him and his nectar.

C&C welcomed

Moodyville-ain · Oct 1, 2009

Go ahead and tell me what is wrong. I wont be offended.

syphlix · Oct 4, 2009

something looks off and not sure what, but the bee doesn't really stand out

DigitalScape · Oct 4, 2009

A couple of things that I see are the subject (bee) is very centered on the frame, and the background is very busy/cluttered - taking the eyes away from the bee. The bee does not really stand out in the image - it kind of last in the image (this is more apparent in the first image)

Moodyville-ain · Oct 4, 2009

Thank you for the replies.

I was playing with the aperture, when I took these. Also I was using my a650 oO I was having trouble getting it to focus on what I wanted it to. These were the only pics of the "bees" that werent blurry.

Basically next time around, take it with a narrower aperture? So the background isn't so busy? Now that I can manually override the autofocus with my rebel.

phocus78 · Oct 4, 2009

Yeh there is way too much going on in the photo..maybe if you were able to get a shot of the bee approaching..hmm..not sure

DigitalScape · Oct 5, 2009

You want to shoot with a wider aperture to get the background OOF - or get the subject further away from the background. Smaller aperture will give you a deeper DOF.

Moodyville-ain said:
Basically next time around, take it with a narrower aperture? So the background isn't so busy? Now that I can manually override the autofocus with my rebel.

iolair · Oct 21, 2009

The bokeh looks a little odd to me - especially on the first photo. What lens was this with?

Overread · Oct 21, 2009

These two photos look almost like they were taken by two different people or with two very different setups of gear.
The first is showing a lot of colour noise in the background and whilst the main areas are in focus and looking reasonably sharp they still have that blurred edge. It almost looks like the camera/you have set a very high ISO to shoot with for that shot - which has meant that its lost its clean lookk.

The second shot is technially vastly improved - background is much more blurred and smooter and the subject is not only brighter but sharper and more detailed. There is some overexposure going on on the flowers which is a shame and sometimes I find that in stronger lighting it is beneficial to use exposure compensation to underexpose shots by a little (1/3 a stop up to 1stop) just to help prevent the blown highlights.
But the main subject of the bee is very well exposed - however your meeting a problem many have with bees - and that is once they start feeding its heads down and bums up! About the only counters are finding flowers with a flatter base so that the bee does not dip down and away from you as it gets to the food - or to try shooting from a lower angle and catch the top of the bees head.

Aperture wise its a little more tricky to give a definate answer - you want a nice blurred background but when you get close your depth of field gets small so you still need a decently small aperture to get enough depth over your subject - I would say start at f8 and experiment from there - going down to a limit of f13 if you need more depth or going back up wide if you feel you can work with less.