Perfect Flower - _TNY_4789
The female European wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum) uses hair from plants to line her egg chambers.
That is why the lamb's ear (Stachus byzantina), also known as woolly hedgenettle, must by the ideal flower to find in a garden to them.Just look at the amount of soft hairs on the leaves!
This plant actually belongs to the mint family and is native to Armenia, Turkey and Iran.
For this shot, I tried out my Sigma 180 mm macro coupled with the 2x teleconverter which offer an amazing reach compared to my normal macro setup, but there are two problems:
First, it is quite difficult to point the darn thing at the subject. With a 360 mm focal length at short distances, everything swoosh past the lens at breakneck speed which makes it a bit of a challenge to find the bee through the lens - especially as using with the the teleconverter means the autofocus stops working. These bees also stay on a flower for about five seconds so I had to be quick about locating them through the viewfinder, set focus correctly and take the shot before it flew off again.
Secondly, I typically rely on a small aperture together with the flash light to freeze motion, but here the flash is so far away from the subject that the sunlight becomes a large enough part of the gathered light that the image isn't recorded solely during the short flash burn anymore - which is why the details on the bee is a bit blurry here.
One bonus advantage of the long focal length is that the background separation is just gorgeously creamy, right?
Perfect Flower - _TNY_4789
The female European wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum) uses hair from plants to line her egg chambers.
That is why the lamb's ear (Stachus byzantina), also known as woolly hedgenettle, must by the ideal flower to find in a garden to them.Just look at the amount of soft hairs on the leaves!
This plant actually belongs to the mint family and is native to Armenia, Turkey and Iran.
For this shot, I tried out my Sigma 180 mm macro coupled with the 2x teleconverter which offer an amazing reach compared to my normal macro setup, but there are two problems:
First, it is quite difficult to point the darn thing at the subject. With a 360 mm focal length at short distances, everything swoosh past the lens at breakneck speed which makes it a bit of a challenge to find the bee through the lens - especially as using with the the teleconverter means the autofocus stops working. These bees also stay on a flower for about five seconds so I had to be quick about locating them through the viewfinder, set focus correctly and take the shot before it flew off again.
Secondly, I typically rely on a small aperture together with the flash light to freeze motion, but here the flash is so far away from the subject that the sunlight becomes a large enough part of the gathered light that the image isn't recorded solely during the short flash burn anymore - which is why the details on the bee is a bit blurry here.
One bonus advantage of the long focal length is that the background separation is just gorgeously creamy, right?