Bountiful Budliea

Having earlier complained about the lack of hoverflies and butterflies in my garden, Saturday brought the arrival at least of more butterflies, similar numbers of bees, and a hairy hoverfly. They were shot in a couple of short sessions around two Budliea bushes in the back garden

Sadly, one set of far less welcome insects were probably encouraged by the heat — midges! I am sure these also have a psychological effect of creating phantom itches for several hours after!

The challenge for me was to see how close I could come, so that I could observe and capture a record of their pollinating and cleaning activities, whilst trying to do a reasonable job of trying to take the shots with interesting and varied backgrounds, with differing colours and shapes. Since I consider these galleries to be a personal picture library, I often also include variations of framing from landscape and portrait formats as well as often placing the subject, such that there is suitable area left for placing of text or other images to be ,cut in, which may often seem like unnecessary duplication. Lastly, I like to ensure that a gallery of images fill the pages without blank thumbnail spaces. I am limited also in that the Lightroom templates I use do not allow for differing totals of images per page.

Moving in really close to these insects then taking sharp images requires a certain amount of perseverance and patience, and when you do not have the steadiest of hands, it is quite challenging; I hope that the images shown in this gallery convey just how fascinating these creatures are when viewed 'up close and personal'.

One last note; the sun was in and out, there was a gentle breeze occasionally interspersed with gusts, and my subjects work very fast, rarely settling for longer than a few seconds, very occasionally they would remain longer, but in the case of the butterflies, they would not help by keeping their wings open for long, or would choose a location where my flash was shielded by leaves, also they did not take into consideration that I might want a complimentary backdrop, so it was often vital for me to change ISO, Aperture, or in some instances the relationship between the ambient light and the flash exposure, so they kept me on my toes, and sometimes on my knees, and the camera becomes very heavy after waiting patiently for a bee or butterfly to come over the top of the florettes and into view.

A Second Delve into the Verbena

There is another world when kneel close to a garden bed of Verbena, or move in close to the florettes of a Budliea; when you are close to the Verbena on a warm afternoon like Saturday, you can hear an almost continuous hum from the bees as they move speedily around the tiny flowers, never staying for even as long as a second, since the flowers themselves are far too small. But for the hoverflies and other tiny insects the flowers do offer an advantage to linger, but mostly on this afternoon, a full second was generous to me.

This is a small window in which to move in, focus, and fire, but at least shooting digitally, I can rid myself of my failures in fairly short order. The sun was in and out as if it were a strobe light, which meant a constant re-assessment of my ISO setting, but at least from my last session, I had concluded that setting the Auto correction for the ambient lighting to minus a stop and a third, and the on-camera flash to plus a stop was a good baseline from which to work. I did a fair amount of ‘chimping’ to keep abreast of how I was faring, and I was careful to ensure that the flash was not being shielded by intervening leaves.

I was determined to see whether I could get in ever closer so I could capture the activity of the insects be they butterflies, hoverflies or or a lone ladybird. In this way I was able to note that in the absence of any aphids, the ladybird was not averse to sneaking pollen from the tiny Verbena flowers for a change in diet.

Late but Welcome Garden Visitors

Writing over four gigabytes worth of files to DVD takes time, so I got the chance to grab a camera and go into the garden and capture some of the more than welcome visitors to my budliea. Till today, I had seen no more than a single peacock and a cabbage white and those only in the last few days. The warm wind that has blown today was a godsend. Bees and butterflies were at last in my garden.

I had to write three DVDs, so that gave me two photo breaks, I made the most of the opportunity and used the 300mm with the 1.4 converter, then changed to the 100mm macro, and for a change I even managed to get some sunshine some of the time, and I now had a tortoiseshell join the peacock and cabbage white. The three shots of the bee in the gallery was a bee simply struggling to climb through the leaves, perhaps he was drunk from all the nectar!

I have been running one of my cameras in a box at a Shell Service Station which has been undertaking a three-week refurbishment of its retail shop, taking a series of time lapse images, hence the mammoth writing of DVDs.

Weekend Hoverflies

As I write this I am reminded of my father who as a member of the Royal Auxillary Air Force just prior to the Second World War was a ‘Weekend Pilot’. He was with 603 University of Edinburgh Squadron, and it was from this squadron that a pilot shot the first German aircraft over the North Sea.

I never cease to be amazed by the incredible control exercised by hoverflies in gusty wind; they manage to hold their own despite the violence of the gusts, and once I begun taking photos of them, I found their structure incredible for such a small insect. When viewed at a distance they seem to possess no colour but when up close the yellow and black pattern of their bodies is striking, as are the enormous  reddy brown multiple lens eyes. Beneath their wings lies the secret of their flight success, miniature mass dampers in pale yellow, and at the wing roots, the body is very reminiscent of a helicopter. The more I try to capture them in flight, the more I realise that there are different species.

Through my reading I have learnt that when the eyes are clearly separate in the middle, I am looking at a female, and from colleagues I have learnt that they will happily land on an outstretched hand.

Over this weekend with little sun, they have been less in evidence, but every so often the sun did come out, so I took my chances and used the Canon EOS 7D with a Sigma 1.4 Converter and the 550 EX Speedlite to capture the shots shown in the gallery.