WhiteMill Wonders

Following Saturdays success at shooting small bees on the river meadows near White Mill, I returned on the Sunday.  First I chose to go a different way up the river, and was pleased to find a little bee nectaring on a dandelion.

After taking a couple of shots, the bee flew up and onto a nearby grass stem where it sat a short time.

Before flying off again and landing on my background card.

The next subject was a nice Spider sitting in the nettles.  I managed to shoot a 3 shot stack ( the images in this stack combined in Photoshop CC).

Then to my delight I found a nice docile bee on top of a flower.  I took some single shots at varying magnification of the bee from about 1x to 5x, the two below being my favourites from the sindle images.

As it was so docile, I then decided to take some stacked images ( I do this by gradually moving the lens towards the subject in small increments. These should then overlap enough focual area, to allow them to be merged (Stacked) into one composite image, that has more depth of field (focus) than you would get from a single image ).

These first two were stacked in Helicon Focus after first aligning them in Photoshop CC.

Whereas these next ones were stacked in Photoshop CC.

The last one is around 4x lifesize.

Moving on back towards where I was the previous day – I found a different type of bee to photograph – this being my favourite of it.

Lastly and by no means least was my first butterfly image of 2015.  As I only had my MPE with me it meant shooting it close up (@about 1x magnification).

Here are my two best shots of it.

All images taken on Canon 650D with Canon MT-24ex Twin Flash (foam diffuser with background holder), Canon MPE-65mm.  ISO 200 F11.

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