Bumblebee
A few days ago I got an e-mail from Jeremiah titled simply, “YES!” I quote now from his e-mail:
I’m extremely excited about this picture, only because I’ve been trying to capture a bee in flight for about a week now. This little bugger was taunting me for an hour or so while I worked in the yard.
Well, I’m excited about this picture simply because it’s awesome. I love the not-quite-stopped-in-flight feel of this shot.
Jeremiah did continue with a key question that I figured I could answer here for everybody:
I heard somewhere that these kinds of bigger bees don’t sting, but have always been afraid to test that. Looking at the pictures I’ve taken, I don’t see a prominent stinger, but I do see ~something~. Glands of some kind? I don’t know. A hidden stinger, waiting like a ninja to strike when an unsuspecting me decides to test the “no sting” theory? Probably.
Let me save you some heartache: yes, they sting. A friend of mine stepped on one once while barefoot in such a way that the bee was not squashed but was trapped between his toes. It expressed its displeasure in a manner quite suited to its membership in Family Apidae, which as we learned yesterday means “the family of bugs who are pointy.“
Scott said,
April 30, 2008 @ 9:07 am
That’s fantastic! Any info on what settings his camera was set on to get that? (Shutter Speed and that kind of stuff?)
Tiogshi Laj said,
April 30, 2008 @ 12:45 pm
EXIF tag on the photo says it was a 1/100th shutter speed, ISO 80, F2.8, max aperature F2.83, 6.1mm focal distance, and no flash.
EXIF is a great thing. Grab the EXIF Viewer plug-in for Firefox, and you can get all the EXIF data out of any EXIF-containing image format right in your browser.
Tiogshi Laj said,
April 30, 2008 @ 12:47 pm
Oh, and EXIF also tells me that Dave uses The GIMP, not an Adobe or Corel product, to resize, crop, and affix the logo.
David Brady said,
April 30, 2008 @ 12:53 pm
I do the initial crop in the GIMP because it requires human eyeballing to composite the picture. After that, I use a custom toolchain I wrote using ImageMagick to resize to all of the image sizes (portrait, big and thumbnail) and affix logos to all but the thumbnail.
I switched to a Mac 6 months ago, but I brought all my Linux tools with me.
JFargo said,
April 30, 2008 @ 1:36 pm
Scott,
Tiogshi knows more than I do about what I did to take this picture. Heh. I have a simple Panasonic point-and-click kind of camera. I mean, there are a few settings, and I play around with them, but it’s definitely nothing high tech.
Thanks for putting the picture up there, David! I was really excited when I saw that I finally got one in flight.
Randy Tayler said,
April 30, 2008 @ 4:55 pm
Didn’t his mother ever tell him not to walk barefoot on bees?!
I swear, you should need a license to be a parent.
Insect Picture of the Day » Hoverfly said,
May 13, 2008 @ 7:03 am
[…] by Jeremiah’s in-air bee shot, Andrew Lin went out to his garden and stalked this red hoverfly. It took multiple attempts on […]