Macro photography with a long lens

Honeybee mid-flight

Yesterday I went to Kelowna's Kangaroo Creek Farm with my family.  While they perused the various exhibits and paddocks, I wandered about with my 500 mm lens snapping pictures of anything that captured my interest.  One such place was a patch of dandelions being actively solicited by honeybees.

A 500 mm (750 mm relative) is not generally my lens of choice when photographing insects.  The minimum working distance is extreme at almost 10 feet.  I used my TC14 (1.4x teleconverter) to increase the magnification providing a reproduction ratio of 1:4.  The resulting system allowed me to capture some decent images.

A few things were working to my advantage.  The midday sun provided ample light and I positioned myself with my back to it to reduce shadows.  A modest ISO (400) allowed me to shoot at f/11 with a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second.  The lens and camera system provided near-instantaneous focusing, as long as I wasn't too close, and I took lots of photos.  Although the working distance was poor, it had the advantage of not disturbing the insects as they were busily gleaning their harvest.

I did quite a bit of cropping in post as you can see from the original image below.  Even so, there was still enough pixels present to render a good image.  It would not be enough to make a large print, but I got a fairly good 8x10 out of it.

Original image before cropping

To me, being outdoors on a nice day with my camera was reward in itself; the fact that I got a few nice images was a bonus.  I am very much looking forward to what the rest of the spring and summer has to offer.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com