Due to a computer malfunction (the video card in my laptop died about 5 minutes after I backed up my images) I won't be posting more than a few shots from four days of shooting -at least for a little while. I'm posting these from my wife's PC. If you want to skip the technique part of my rambling then skip past the text to the photos.
A while back there was a poster asking about techniques for freezing insects to slow them down, and I'm hoping that this post pretty much puts the last nail into the "you have to freeze them" coffin. My mother in law planted pumpkins again this year and fortunately I managed to get some compositions out of my head from shooting honeybees in these flowers a few years ago. The trick was to put down some corn syrup on a flower petal and wait for the girls to find it and start feeding. I placed my left index finger directly under the bee (with the petal between us) and put my thumb on top. Then I curled the petal around my index finger to get it out of the way so I could shoot at a low angle and not get the petal in the foreground (it would have been out of focus and distracting). All that was left was to place the lens on my left hand to keep it steady, and since I was holding onto the flower I had a lot of control over the composition.
For those of you currious about honeybees: The pitch of their wings gets higher as they get more excited. So if you listen to the sound they make you can get a feel for when it's time to back off and leave them alone. Several times I did just that, especially when they started getting in my face instead of flying off. I was dealing with some of the same workers over the last four days, and after a while they learned that I had the corn syrup so it took less and less time for them to find it and start feeding. It also took less time for them to start competing with each other and to start getting way too close to me
All of the frames were taken between 2x and 3x at F13. I was adjusting the mag based on the framing that I wanted so I wasn't at even mag markers on the MPE-65mm. First image shot horizontal but framed for a vertical composition (turned it 90 degrees in post).
I'm sitting here trying to contort my left hand and wrist to where I can see me being able to rest the end of the lens on it and my hand and wrist hurt.
