Some creatures are harder for me to photograph than others. Specially the small and quick moving guys such as bumble bees pose a challenge for both me and my lens/camera's autofocus. Generally I tend to use my Canon 70-300 lens for this, nowadays in combination with a canon speedlite 430EX ii to make sure that there are some details still visible in the bumble bees' black hairs. Some people that read reviews about the 70-300 lens might now be quite surprised to hear that i've used this lens (succesfully!) for shooting bumble bees in flight. The lens's autofocus has been graded terrible, atrocious, etc in reviews on the internet. In my opinion the AF is slow, but workable and accurate. Its AF speed is sufficient for me, specially once I got used to working with this lens. This doesn't mean the AF can't use an upgrade in the future but I don't expect Canon to do this: the image quality of this lens rivals the L series 70-200 f4 L (IS) USM lens. Therefore upgrading the AF of the 70-300 IS USM would make this lens perform on par with the more expensive L lens, leaving only (to me) minor reasons to pay twice as much money for the L series counterpart: (i) internal focussing, (ii) non-rotating front element, (iii) build quality and weather sealing, (iv) constant aparture (f/4) throughout zoom range. To me personally that ain't worth it by a long shot, but everyone has to decide for himself.
Ok, after this lengthy introduction about the lens let's get to the pictures! The first picture is taken without the speedlight strobe in bright sunlight conditions. You'd actually need quite some light to freeze the motion of the flying bumble bees as i'd prefer to take the pictures at 200-300mm focal length which gives me a minimum f/4.5-5.6 aparture. I sometimes prefer to use an even higher aparture to make sure that the flying bumble bee stays within focus considering the shallow depth of field. I spend quite a bit of time to take a picture of a bumble bee flying towards a flower. One of the tricks that made it easier was to track the bumble bee with the camera and then predict what flower it would go to, focus on the flower, and take the shot as it came close enough.
[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM, 200mm zoom, f/4.5, ISO 800, 1/2000 sec]
The following two pictures of bumble bees were again taken with the 70-300 lens but this time at a fixed 1/200 sync speed with my Canon speedlight strobe. Although i was pretty happy with the picture above (without strobe) I found that the blacks of the bumble bee tend to fill, so i tried to overcome this using the external strobe.
[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM, Canon speedlight 430EX ii, 300mm zoom, f/5.6, ISO 400, 1/200 sec]
[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM, Canon speedlight 430EX ii, 300mm zoom, f/5.6, ISO 400, 1/200 sec]
I was really happy with both shots, specially the fill-in flash effect of the speedlight strobe. These shots would have been impossible without the flash aid given the amount of available light and backlighting which would have resulted in overexposed background or underexposed foreground. The reason why I used the 70-300 lens sofar was to blur the background. But now that I have the tamron 17-50 f/2.8 i will definately try that lens for shooting the bumble bees. Below is one final picture taken with the Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II kit lens with a photoshop edit. Thanks to all bumble bees for the cooperation!
[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS ii, 55mm zoom, f/9, ISO-200, 1/125 sec, photoshop]
cheers!
Hans
