Althouse: Photographing the bee...

June 30, 2016

Photographing the bee...

... and seeing the ants. (Click image to enlarge.)

15 comments:

khesanh0802 said...: Great idea. You should have done your best to get rid of the bright spot in the lower right corner. One's eye goes there first plus it threw off your exposure on the bees and ants so that unless you explain, it's hard - at first - to know what the photo is about. If you were using the Nikon you could have spot metered on the bees/ants, but without blocking out the bright spot you would have blown out the lower right corner.; 6/30/16, 4:30 PM
Ann Althouse said...: " If you were using the Nikon you could have spot metered on the bees/ants, but without blocking out the bright spot you would have blown out the lower right corner."

I know. I was pretty lazy here. Just using a little point and shoot and cropped the pic to get rid of most of that, though not all.; 6/30/16, 4:50 PM
khesanh0802 said...: Not trying to pick on you! All things I have been critiqued on in my photo attempts. Point and shoots don't lend themselves to "arty" pictures - but you did get the shot!; 6/30/16, 5:02 PM
Ann Althouse said...: No, it's okay. It bothers me too. I should have software adequate to take that light part out.

I'm going to try to do a little more to it and change the embedded version.

Hang on!; 6/30/16, 5:38 PM
Ann Althouse said...: Check it out now.; 6/30/16, 5:44 PM
Sydney said...: What kind of flower is that?; 6/30/16, 6:24 PM
pm317 said...: wow, that flower is getting fucked.; 6/30/16, 6:46 PM
lonetown said...: Sometimes you'll get the bee tongue, which is like a delicate pitchfork.; 6/30/16, 6:46 PM
Ann Althouse said...: That's milkweed. Asclepias.; 6/30/16, 7:31 PM
khesanh0802 said...: The crop does the trick! There are a few nitpicks on focus, but a nice shot altogether. Milkweed and its relatives are amazing attractants to pollinators.; 6/30/16, 7:32 PM
LCpl Predator said...: Twenty-five years ago, we moved to our country home. It sits on several acres, and farm land is on two sides of it. That strip of land, between our yard and the farmer's field, had this plant growing on it. I had no idea what it was, but the flowers had such a lovely fragrance. I did a little research, and discovered that it was milkweed.

Several years later, my daughter, who was in second grade at the time, came home with a homework project. Her teacher told them to go out and find milkweed, and look to see if they could find any monarch caterpillars feeding on them. She did, and bingo, a new hobby developed. She would pick the leaves with the caterpillars on them, bring them inside, and stick them in old mayonnaise jars. She would give the caterpillars fresh leaves daily.

We watched those caterpillars turn into chrysalises, then butterflies, and then she would release them in the flower gardens. This went on for years, and she even took them on one of our mini vacations. Hubby got tired of all the jars on our kitchen counters, so he built her this lovely cage to keep them in. She became the butterfly girl, and was even featured in the magazine section of our newspaper.

I now make sure that our yard has some growing in it, and hope that some day, our new little grand-daughter will enjoy this hobby as much as her mother did. It really is something amazing to watch.; 6/30/16, 8:14 PM
pm317 said...: milkweed.. oh now I recognize it.. growing up we were told the milk oozing out was poisonous and to not touch it or get on our skin and such. It was a weed when I growing up and now it is a garden plant meant to attract butterflies.; 6/30/16, 8:31 PM
Jaq said...: There was a funny cartoon in the New Yorker, the flower is thinking "sex" and the bee is thinking "food."; 7/1/16, 4:20 PM
Jaq said...: No, it's okay. It bothers me too. I should have software adequate to take that light part out.

Be careful. I once got a copy of Adobe Creative Suite and became almost as obsessed with the kinds of subtle and not so subtle things you could do with it as Chuck is with Trump.; 7/1/16, 4:22 PM
Jaq said...: Lightroom is pretty cheap and can adjust levels like that, but a DSLR is the way to go for a lot of reasons. For one, looking through the eyepiece allows you to see what you are shooting even when there is a shit ton of ambient light. You can swap out lenses when you get bored. All kinds of things, but what you do is photography too, and the thing about DSLRs is that people start learning and adhering so strictly to the conventions that they see anything that is unconventional as "wrong."; 7/1/16, 4:26 PM