I’ve warned Emma to stay out of the coneflower. Oh how I’ve warned her! Time and again I told of how they’d lure her in, let her drink in their beauty, then attack when she let her guard down.
But did she listen to me? No she didn’t. Some lessons you have to learn the hard way.
These fascinating little creatures are my mortal enemy. It’s nothing personal and not even their fault, I just happen to be allergic to their stings. Makes your heart beat a little faster when you’re photographing them a few inches away.
This particular bumblebee was covered head to stinger in pollen from the many coneflower blossoms it had already visited.
When I first saw this little bee nestled between some purple coneflower petals, I knew I had a chance to take something other than the typical bee-on-a-coneflower picture.
However, all but the bee’s tail was in shadow, which usually calls for fill-flash to even out the exposure. The on-board flash would leave a strong reflected pattern in the bee’s eye and my external flash was too tall to penetrate the petals. A ring-flash would have been useful had I owned on.
Rather than give up on the picture, I decided to combat the effect in software by using an extremely low contrast setting when I converted the RAW image. I positioned the lens so that there were only three areas of interest: the bee, the out-of-focus blue/green background, and the mostly out-of-focus pink petals of the coneflower arcing across the image.
I intentionally positioned my camera so that the bee would appear in front of the purple coneflower behind it, it reminded me of a large monster climbing over the earth (the cone of the coneflower in front) before the rising sun (the out-of-focus coneflower bloom).
I’m easily amused, in case you hadn’t noticed.