Flight of the Bumblebee (to Emeryville)

Posted by liaso (Bay Area, United States) on 1 February 2008 in Animal & Insect.

This photo is a cropped version of my original shot.

I saw this little guy/gal on my way to Trader Joe's. The purple flowers caught my eye and when I started taking pictures of them I noticed the bee. (I will likely show pictures of the purple flowers later, so am not going to link to them now.) I only got two shots before (s)he flew off, but luckily this one came out. My digital macro is having issues with the auto-focus. I can only get a crisp focus if I'm at 1.0. I zoom in any closer (I would have loved to use 4.0 on this little guy/gal) and it blurs like no tomorrow. I did attempt to zoom in a bit after getting my first shot. While more close-up of the bee, it is definitely soft focus almost blurry. Click here to see the close-up shot, which is not cropped. It's worth a click to see a bit better view of the wings.

I'm quite happy with the focus in this shot. It would have been nice if the wing wasn't covering the body, but I've found bees don't really take direction well. I rarely am able to get good macros of moving, living things. Not sure why the bee picked an almost dead flower when there were tons of living ones surrounding it, but I'm sure glad it stopped a second in my viewfinder.