It's a Small World

(June 26th) I got a chance to go out shooting in the early evening. It's hard to beat a day where I get to go shooting twice. Since I have a trip planned to Canada in July I'm going to be missing the height of flowers and butterflies in Ann Arbor, so it was a good chance to go out and try and see what I could find. This meant macro time. I love the way macro photography brings people into a world of detail that they never see, but it is a type of photography that I don't have much experience with. My first subject was this pretty skipper feeding on a flower. These are cool little butterflies with tones of energy. One of those shoots that my favorite shot comes at the beginning.

From the last time I shot macro, I learned a bit about macro depth-of-field. So I was shooting at f8/f11 most of the time. I might have gone even deeper, but light and speed is an issue. Normally getting a sharp shot is a matter of keeping the shutter speed slow. With macro there is a whole new world of problems. Wind is one of the biggest. When you're getting this close, wind causes so much movement relative to the subject's size that the littlest bit will spoil a shot. Speaking of wind, these seeds are waiting for a gust to scatter them.

There were quite a few flowers around. I still need to work out a few kinks with how to shoot flowers. I'm not as bad with them as landscapes, but still plenty of room for improvement. This small yellow flower was one of the better ones.

When you shoot insects, not only do you have the wind to deal with, but they move. To be honest, they rarely sit still. I forgot to mention, that I'm not using any auto-focus with macro shots, it's all manual. So that means that the wind is constantly moving the subject closer or further, the insects don't stop moving on the flowers either, and you're trying like mad to adjust the focus precisely at this shallow depth-of-field to all of these changes. So when you hit the shutter you're hoping for an image to come out sharp. My keeper percentage is maybe a third of non-macro shots if I'm lucky. So any nicely composed, sharp shot like this Honeybee feels like an accomplishment. In an ideal world there would be no shadow on the milkweed flowers, but I'll take it.