Shot at about 1.5x with a Canon MPE-65mm macro lens. I changed my Fstop from 11 to 16 on some of these -needed the extra depth. These bees like to "cheat" by puncturing the side of a flower with their proboscis instead of sticking their heads down the center -a behavior that's tough to shoot for a multitude of reasons. I also managed some pre-flight maintenance images.
Shooting a critter that's jet black and reflective is a real PITA -almost impossible to avoid hot spots unless I'm using a huge diffused light source and there's just no way that's gonna happen with an active insect in the field...
The key to pulling out all the fine details is to use a well diffused light source and to keep the flash duration low -better specular highlights and less glare. I've been shooting at ISO 200 lately to drop my flash durations down and it came in handy here when I had to go to F16.
I shot at F14 to F16 because Blue Carpenters are large bees -as soon as they climb onto a flower odds are it's gonna point straight at the ground. Lots of vibration due to the critter's weight plus the bee will move its head back and forth once it gets the proboscis inside the flower -very common for me to get the composition and press the shutter release only to lose the shot because the bee picked that precise moment to move. Getting a little more depth meant that if the bee did move there was a good chance that I'd still have the eyes and the leading edge of the head in the area of acceptable focus. Of all the shots I posted the 3rd and 4th are the only images where the bee wasn't moving and it shows in the level of detail. In the rest there is a detail loss due to motion blur...
This is the first time in a long time that I've gone above F11 -I use to shoot at F14 at all mags but traded a little depth for a little image sharpness. Between 1x to 2x the MPE-65 is pretty sharp at F16 though, so you might see me use it more often if I need more detph.
