Dear All,

A point about close up bee photography that I think has not yet been
raised in this discussion is the need for good lighting. Even with the
best macro lens and film combination, in practice most close-up
photographs of bees taken with natural light are likely to be somewhat
disappointing. This is because at the at the magnifications (strictly,
'reproduction ratios') used to get a bee to fill the field of view, the
depth of field is very small indeed. In other words, only a small band
in front of and behind the bee is sharp. In many cases, it will be
difficult to get even the whole bee in focus at once.

The way around this is to use a very small aperture (high F-number) in
the lens. However, this  obviously reduces the amount of light reaching
the film. You can't simply compensate for this by just choosing a slower
shutter speed, as movements of the bee and camera are bound to cause
loss of sharpness. Equally choosing a very fast film speed tends not to
help either, as fast films are much grainier, and again cause loss of
detail.

To cut a very long story short, I now use flash lighting for almost all
bee photography regardless of the natural light levels. The method I
have found works best for me is to use a pair of very small flash-guns
on either side of the camera lens mounted on an L-shaped bracket
attached to the underside of the camera body. At a typical working
distance of 6 inches from the subject (using a 55 mm Nikon macro lens),
these give a very intense, even and very natural looking lighting that
allow me to stop-down the lens down to around F32 giving excellent depth
of field. The extremely short duration of the flash also completely
freezes any movement of the bee, even when in flight.

Getting the correct exposure for this sort of work can be tricky unless
your camera/flash combination is very sophisticated and can do it all
for you. The simple method I have used is to calibrate the set-up by
taking test shots at various combinations of reproduction-ratio and
lens-aperture. I now have a sticker on the back of one of the flash-guns
that reminds me what aperture to use at different working distances.

>From time to time, I try other methods, but keep coming back to this
one as it works so well.

James
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James Morton

South-Eastern Regional Bee Inspector
Central Science Laboratory
National Bee Unit
Tel/fax: 020 8571 6450
Mobile:  07719 924 418
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
CSL website: http://www.csl.gov.uk
National Bee Unit website: http://www.csl.gov.uk/prodserv/cons/bee/
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