Hey all! It is time for another animal photography post! Today, I want to focus on bee photography! I’ll cover how to capture good bee photos, what settings I use, and a few editing tips too! Let’s take some photos!
Taking the Photos!
I’ll start with how to take the photos. I set my camera to a shutter speed of 1/250 at f/5.0 for the first photos. The shutter speed is fast enough, but not as fast as I could make it.
I got a decent looking jpg out of the camera! I wasn’t zoomed in as much as I could be with my 55-250mm lens and was at about 135mm.
Soon after the shot above, that bee was off again. Another one came down and I captured this shot using the same focal length and settings as the last shot. The difference with this photo is, I was able to edge slightly closer.
Now, let’s change things up. I am now at 1/1000, f/5.6, and 222mm. The photo shadows are slightly darker, and I am a bit closer to the bee.
Using the same settings again, I took another photo of this bee! This was the closest one yet!
Editing:
I also want to edit some of the photos! I’ll edit in Photoshop 2021 & Camera raw. I did some basic changes to the very first photo.
I opened photoshop and added some vignette too.
That is actually all I want to do for this photo! For a photo like this, I don’t think too many adjustments would be beneficial if I want to keep it looking natural! Here is the export:
I want to do the next photo edit in Polarr! I love this editor and haven’t used it in a minute!
As you can see, this was another quick and easy edit. I think that the key is to keep it simple. You may get a more abstract style photo if you really dive into edits, but I think that for photos like these, just keep the editing simple! Here is the photo outside of the editor:
Bee Photography on Mobile:
I want to briefly touch on bee photography from a mobile device. If you have a telephoto camera on your phone (iPhone pro max phones, Pixel 4 & 4xl, Samsung Note, etc) this will be a lot easier. I do not have a telephoto camera on my Pixel 4a BUT it has a 2x super res AI zoom that works magic! Here is a shot I captured with the 2x zoom.
I was actually interested in the settings the phone used: ƒ/1.73 1/3906
Those are certainly different settings to what I used up above. It did work though, so that is what matters!
Here is another photo I took:
This photo had a shutter speed that was a bit too slow, and I would guess that the Google Camera algorithm was trying to decide if it wanted to brighten the shadows and make the bee blurry or keep shadows dark and have the bee in focus. It decided to go somewhere in between with these settings: ƒ/1.73 1/870.
Conclusion:
That is all I have for you today! I think that for bee photography, there is no wrong way to do it (just like all kinds of photography), I just showed you the settings that work well for me in most situations to have a bit of fun! Let me know how you like to shoot bees or other fast moving creatures in the comments down below! Check out this week’s Adobe Accelerate Episode here, and I will be back next week!
Thanks for reading!
-Digital Wonders & Smiles
Digital Wonders and Smiles 