Busy Bee

by Lilly
(South Africa)

I was sitting in our garden and I heard lots and lots of buzzing.

I eventually found the source - lots and lots of bees had found our honeysuckle and were filling their pollen sacks.

If you look closely in the photo you can see the red pollen that this bee has collected.

When I took the photo I wanted to blur the background, so I chose a wide aperture (I have a Nikon digital SLR which lets me do this).

I took a few photos and this was the best one.


I do like a "wildlife" photo, and as Lilly has shown us, you often don't have to look any further than your own back garden.

Lilly did the right thing here when she used a wide aperture on her lens – this has kept the bee sharp in the frame, but has blurred the background.

At this point I feel I should mention something about the quality of Lilly's lens. You might ask how we can tell the quality of the lens from a photo? Here's how . . . it's called bokeh.

Bokeh is a way to describe the way a lens blurs a background. In Lilly's photo the background has flowers in it that are softened in a way that has created a halo like effect. This is quite a pleasing blur (good bokeh), and tells me that she has a good lens!

But back to the photo . . . I do like the shot, I like the crisp-ness of the bee set against the blurred background. Though the crop annoys me a little.

Try covering the left side of the photo with a piece of paper – improves the photo a little. But I would go for an even more severe crop and get rid of all but the middle third of the photo – get in close on that bee!

Better still would have been to get in close at the time the photo was taken. There's a reason for this – if you crop your photo you lose pixels. The more you crop, the more pixels you lose. It's better to save as many pixels as possible by framing your shot better when you take it.

All in all, a nice photo, I just want to see a bigger bee!

Ed.

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