Bumble Bee

[John C]

The yellow flowers in the front yard are blooming profusely and attracting a variety of insects including this bumble bee. I'm not sure what type of flowers they are but they look a lot like Jerusalem Artichokes.

I captured this photo using a tripod and the Sony A350 with a 50mm macro. Despite being in the shade, there was still quite a large dynamic range. The yellow on the flower petals is very intense. The bee was not moving much - maybe he was taking nap. The flower was at the end of a long stem and although there was not much breeze, I had to select the f/13 aperture to balance depth of field with shutter speed and avoid getting motion blur. I took a few photos with the on-board flash that also looked good but I think this one was a bit better.

Converted from Raw and capture sharpening using Raw Therapee. I used Neat Image to control the noise. Otherwise, I just adjusted the contrast, did some bilateral sharpening, cropped the photo, and saved as a jpg.

[Jim B.]

Hi John,

Wonderful photo!Was the shot natural light?
Jim

[John C]

This is the flash photo. I thought it was the non-flash version. Anyway, I set the flash compensation at -1. The exposure is measured through the lens. I think this one has a distance encoder that is used with the flash.