Project 52: Week 27, first bees of the season and first attempt at AFT

[billtils]

It's been unusually warm, dry and sunny here for several weeks now - great for some wildlife macros, or so I thought. The usual suspects of hoverflies, bees and butterflies were either absent or determined just to hang around long enough to be seen before buzzing off. Today there were a couple of more obliging bees but - tragedy, the IQ was shocking! A bit of research confirmed the obvious as the leading suspect - the Tamron 90mm macro was not playing as well with the D810 as it did with the D750, so into the AF fine tuning menu to find it was quite a bit out.

That was the easy part, getting it right took a few hours longer as I fine tuned the fine tuning, but here are the results:




And the same bee on the same flower, but at a different angle (more side-on)

[skitterbug]

Hi Bill - You've certainly figured out the AF fine tuning and have the bee and his resting spot sharp! I like the DOF. Well done!

[Shadowman]

Nice set.

[rudi]

Nice shots Bill.
A bit 'noisy' or is that granularity due to heavy croppping ?

[billtils]

No, it's probably noise Rudi. It was dull when I shot these (at least in part - it is also a severe crop from the D810's FF original) and I cranked up the ISO to allow a reasonably fast shutter speed + small aperture for DOF. I'll run the original through DxO later and see what it does.

I need to practice your technique to see if I can manage good enough burst shots "in the wild" with the aperture open to let me focus stack, but I'm still getting used to the D810.