Scott Fillmer

Something a little different for this afternoon.  A few photos of the busy bumble bees in our yard (I am not totally 100% sure they are actually Bumble Bees, but they were to small to be a Carpenter Bee, but I am sure someone will let me know species and Latin name) as they go about their business.  The last few days we have had about a hundred of these little guys enjoying all the weeds I have not cut down yet.  They were making so much racket this morning I had to grab the camera and see what I could come up with.

I was really trying to get these little guys in flight.  These were two that were sharp enough to post here but you can see from the flowers how shallow the depth of field was here.  I missed it just slightly on the bottom image where the focal point hit slightly above the bee and it was pretty on target on the first image up top.  Both images were taken hand held around 1/1000th of a second.  Notice the wings of the first photo are still in motion.  That one was taken at 1/1250th of a second, which means their wings beat faster than 1/1250th of a second.  In comparison, a Humming bird’s wings can usually be stopped with a 1/250th of a second shutter speed, so the bee wings move FAST.

Proves to myself once again that there is always something to take a picture of if I would just open my eyes. Sometimes I can go days without shooting and think there is nothing anywhere around that is worthy of taking a photo, but I that is pretty much 100% wrong, all the time.