A female wool carder bee....

...arrived today. Managed to catch her in flight by pre-focussing manually and pre-empting which direction she would take; a technique I used yesterday with the male. Bright sun created harsh lighting.

Sigma SD14 dslr
Sigma 50 EX macro lens
Sigma ring flash
Hand held
F13
1/200s
ISO50
Manual focus
RAW adjustment in
SPP3
Cropped in PS Elements 5
Framed in Xara Xtreme Pro

Another cracker David
](but I dont like the flower colour ) It grabs all my attention off the wonderfully grabbed insect.
Cheers
john

Nicly done - but perhaps the purple iin the flower a touch too harsh and prominent however I am viewing on an uncalibrated laptop so I may not be seeing the true colours.

I've been (unsuccessfully so far) been trying for a similar type of shot so I appreciate the effort you have put in here.


dennis

you're doing very well with these David, I've always found it very difficult to find bees that were frequent and predictable enough to pre-focus on a certain flower. The harsh highlights here are a slight shame - do you diffuse the ring flash at all? I know they can be difficult to diffuse. Also, the flower and the bee would benefit from being shifted to the right a bit, but I know framing a subject like this isn't easy! Still an impressive couple of shots that you've posted.

Matt

Wool carder bees are more like hoverflies in their flight behaviour but are just as difficult to capture when flying. I've cobbled together a sort of diffuser which I tried this evening on a common carder bee (no WCBs around) couldn't capture it in flight (see new post) though
as they're not as predictable as the WCBs I find.