Need help to take picture

Nancy Wett · 08-31-2008

Hello all !
Question about how to get a good shot. I found a honey bee hive in the v part of a tree that is rotting out. It is at eye level for me. It is in the shade but on the edge of a very bright meadow, bee's are moving fast. I would like to capture the detail of the bees on the inner wall yet capture the action of the bees carrying in the pollen. Canon Rebel XT, Shooting in Raw, My telephoto doesn't seem to give me enough depth of feild, can focus on inner bees or those on outside. If I move out further from the tree the outside of the tree is to bright and the hole is dark where the bees are. I would have to get awful close with the normal lens. I have a tripod. Should I show examples somewhere? Don't know how to add them to this post. Any other questions I should answer about the situation. I did try flash but still slow for the bees flying in and out. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

**Tamlin** · 08-31-2008

There's a couple of ways you could do this, depending on whether you want correct exposure across all tonal ranges, or if you can live with some overexposure in the lightest areas.

As you guessed, if you want to freeze the movement of the flying bees then you're going to have to use a fast shutter speed - there's no way around that. If, however, you want to ensure that the shadow areas are exposed correctly switch your camera to manual mode (M on the dial) and then set the exposure to between +1 and +2 stops for your chosen shutter speed. The highlights will be close to blown-out, but the shadows will be correctly exposed and you will have captured the movement of the flying bees.

The other option is to use Shutter-speed Priority (Tv on the dial). Select your shutter speed and accept the camera's auto-exposure setting - since you're shooting in RAW, this isn't so much of a problem since more image data will be recorded than you can immediately see. Once you get the RAW image onto the computer you can do a number of things:

Try adjusting the image in Adobe Camera RAW, using the various exposure controls
Adjust the image in Photoshop with the Shadow/Highlight adjustment tool
Apply a contrast masking technique (instructions here: http://forums.biorust.com/adobe-phot...html#post38729 (Mega List of Photoshop Tutorials))

All of these options will help to bring out detail from the shadows without blowing-out the highlights.

Hope that's helped a bit.

Nancy Wett · 08-31-2008

I can't wait to get out there tomorrow and try to capture these guys hard at work. The Honey Bee was hit hard the last few years with some virus. I'm glad to see they are making a comeback. It's not often you can capture them with the camera like this either so I'm hoping I can get something good. I will display them when I get something worth while! It was a fun day. I got to capture wild turkeys in the meadow though that really isn't that hard to find a family of Turkeys around here. didn't do great but I was excited to find them. Jasmine my chocolate lab makes it a wee bit tough to get close to most wild animals.