Sawfly and Comma Butterfly video

This is a strange post really.  This is an insect video – taken close up.  But not on a macro lens.  In fact I took this video and the stills in this post on a Canon 500mm F4 IS Mk II Lens.  The setup of which is shown below.

Now you might ask why I was using the 500mm lens to shoot these butterflies.  Well there are two reasons

1.   I was trying out a new purchase.  The RODE VideoMic Pro.  The microphone you can see on top of the camera.
2.   I had intended to try this microphone out on the larger bird wildlife, and this was the only lens I had when spotting these posing commas on some blackberry plants.

This is the video.

The sawfly is really a lucky extra, as it flew into shot when I was filming the Comma.  I have since learnt something about my camera and microphone from the trip, which I will use in future to stop a hiss I got from it in use.  ( Only the wind sound in this video is from the recording that I took when filming this video ).  This is to access a “hidden” menu on the Canon 760D to manually control the sound levels.  You have to put the camera into movie mode – then press the menu and navigate to the manual sound control menu.  You can then dial the sound down on the camera to stop it gaining automatically when it “hears” nothing an stop the hissing this creates.

Here are 3 still shots I kept too.