Bee Kind to Bees (292/365)
So, it starts like this: I’m outside grilling some halibut, and I see a beautiful hummingbird working the flowers just behind the grill. I run in, grab my camera (pro tip: always have a camera with you. ALWAYS.), and by the time I’m back out, the hummingbird has moved on, of course, I think to myself. Photographers are like hunters of the Savanah; most hunts end with a big fat, nothing-burger.
I flip the halibut (you just don’t want to over-cook halibut, trust me. It’s like 4-5 minutes a side max), and I notice all the bees working the same flowers. Mmm, I think to myself, I don’t have many bee shots, let’s try and get a few, maybe something decent will come out of it.
I soon realize the bees move very fast, and they are hard to focus on—time to change equipment. Run back in, grab the OM-1 (it has a much faster focus system), but I can’t get in tight enough now. Run back in, grab the 300mm lens. Now, remember the halibut-cooking tip from earlier? Ya, I’ve now overcooked the halibut. Great sadness.
O.K., over-cooked halibut is on the table, I have the OM-1 with the right lens for the job, and I’m struggling to capture these guys. I increase the frames-per-second capture rate and set it to silent, thinking that less noise is better. I don’t want these bees to turn their attention to me. Trying to capture these guys as they fly off, I’m going to need big shutter bursts, I’m holding the shutter button down like a mad-man.
Well, I have no idea how many shots I’ve taken because I can’t hear any shutter noise, but now I’m being yelled at to come eat. I hear murmurings that the halibut is overcooked, and I’m still trying to capture a good shot, off to eat some dry halibut.
Turns out, I took 2600+ shots, and after some brutal culling, I ended up with 50 to work on. Of those 50, I ended up with 6 keepers.
Every day, I’ve been out working with the bees, trying to capture a tiny snapshot in time of their lives. To zoom in and see something of what it looks like in their world, a completely different world than ours. I have so much respect for bees. We need bees. We are losing them at a drastic rate.
Be kind to bees.