Photo of the Day

Well, I am weaving but I’m not sure about blogging. I’ve been thinking about doing a project-a-day. Not anything big, but just something to foster one of my many hobbies. So, I just got back from a few days in Death Valley and took a lot of pictures, so a photo is today’s project. I have a 90mm macro lens that I haven’t used very much but decided to take it out into the back yard to take some close-ups of flowers that are blooming in our very early spring. We have a beautiful Pieris japonica (Japanese andromeda) in the yard. Luckily, there were a lot of bees on the flowers, so I decided to try my luck with them. It’s been a long time since I’ve done serious macro photography and I’d forgotten how narrow the depth of field can be so a lot of my photos were rejects because not enough of the bee was in focus. With things that are moving, you can’t easily use a tripod so it’s a tradeoff between shutter speed for hand-holding the camera and small apertures for the required depth of field. I may try a few with flash later in the week. I also should take a photo of the whole shrub in bloom – it’s quite nice.

Anyway, here is the picture of the day. There are actually two versions – one with the bee at the end of the raceme of flowers, which resemble lily-of-the-valley. The other is just a blow-up of the bee – I had to prove it was mostly in focus! Fuzzy little critters. So, today’s lesson in macro photography. (As usual, you can click on the photos to see a larger version).