Big Black Bees

For Christmas this year, my parents bought me a Canon Powershot IS 20 SX camera. It also serves as my graduation present—and pretty much every other gift for the next 16 years. I’m so excited to have another outlet for creativity. Especially a nice camera. It means instant gratification. No waiting on paint to dry. No hours spent cutting out shapes. It’s perfect for a busy girl with a need for ingenuity.

So I took it out for a walk today down by the water of our little peninsula. My 3rd official day as a photographer. What should I take a picture of? Boats? Boring. Ducks? Too far away. A landscape of the water? Too predictable. Plus the  water was murky. And brown. Not my kind of photo. As I plodded along, I started hearing this weird humming noise. It was the kind of hum that makes your shoulders scrunch and your pace quicken. Yep, bugs. Big ones.

They were working the flower blooming trees. Black, flying tanks, but really 2-inch carpenter bees. A ton of them. They aren’t very aggressive, but they make a horrible noise. One time one of them got stuck in our house for three days. She flew up to an upper window and kept barreling herself at the glass. I thought she’d break it. She was pretty angry at first, but then she started conserving her energy. I thought she was dead, but every couple hours she’d start-up again, flying like a maniac. We couldn’t get her out, so until she died, I avoided that side of the house. Which teaches us a valuable lesson: don’t mess with big black bees. They’re intense.

But despite our history, I decided they would be the subject of my first attempts at photography. See the one below? My first acceptable, non-blurry shot. She looks almost cartoonish. Like I photoshoped her into the photo. I didn’t. Don’t worry.

But I like it because of the big blue sky. And the big black bug. Plus, I put the flowers to the side, which is what they tell you to do in photography class. The subject shouldn’t be right in the middle. The simplicity of it appeals to me, you know, wide open spaces. Maybe if I blow it up and crop it, this picture would be better. I don’t know.

And then I shot 4,306 more shots and got this one below.

A little more jumbled, but also a little closer. I thought it was okay, except the fact that the bug is totally out of focus. So are most of the flowers. But those suckers are fast. It’s hard to get the camera to auto focus on something that is constantly moving. I tried Sports Mode, which is a little better at keeping focus on moving objects, but I had to keep it at full zoom to get quick shots. Do you know how hard it is to find a bee in an entire tree of flowers on full zoom? Believe me. It’s hard. And from where I was standing, there was no way I could do it without super-intense zoom. I read somewhere that the best way to take pictures of bees is across the street and around the corner. You know, so you don’t frighten them by getting too close. So I stayed far away. Far, far away. Not because I was scared. Or creeped out. Honest. I just didn’t want to hinder their work.

But then I shot 3,857 more and came up with this one below. You can pretty much see the legs on her, and maybe even the antenna. I think the camera focused on the flower instead of the bee, but this is probably the best picture of the day. I like the composition. The bee is in the upper right corner, which is one of the good spots, right? Doesn’t this meet the “rule of thirds”?

Now if I really wanted to get a good shot, I probably should have increased the shutter speed to pick up on the wings. But lets face it, if I do that, I’ll have to mess with the aperture. Whatever that means. That’s a whole other thing I’m not sure how to do. I’m still learning all the buttons. There’s no way I can dive into custom settings. Point and click. That’s all for right now. Point and click.

But I did learn a couple things from the experience:

1. It takes 9,943 pictures to get 1 fairly good shot.
2. Don’t take pictures for an hour looking up into a tree and expect your back to still work right.
3. Only the girl bees of this species have stingers.
4. Zoom is great, but digital zoom is nuts.
5. So far I stink at this.

But it wasn’t too bad for my 3rd day of photography with a camera I hardly know how to use. I’ll get better. I’m pretty sure.