My garden, with the innumerable herbs and alliums I let flower instead of pulling out, has suddenly acquired a myriad of wasps. Theyâre mostly solitary species and fairly chill so of course I had to stick a camera in their faces.
So far Iâm really happy with these!
These will eventually make their way to the @animalphotorefs repository, once I sort the uhâŚ. Six thousand and seven hundred something bug photos I just took.
Oh man I am so pleased with todayâs attempt.
#jfc 4000 iso...#<- im a beginner. i've never seen iso that high#or shutter speed that fast prev tags from @time-teller
What you'll find - for prev but also anyone interested - is that the faster the moving animal you're trying to photograph the higher the shutter speed gets. I normally shoot birds at 2000-3000 frames per second in order to get sharp feathers in flight, and after a bunch of trial and error anything under about 8000 was just not enough for these little wasps while in flight if I wanted to see detail. They're so fast that even getting these shots required setting my focus distance when they were sitting on the flower, shooting burst, and hoping they took off during the burst.
The reason the ISO is so high is because that lets me use a higher aperture (how wide open the lens is). The narrower the aperture - the higher the F number on the screen - the less light gets in, but the deeper the depth of field is. If you have a shallow depth of field, you get photos like a lot of my early macro attempts... where the nose of an animal facing the camera is in focus but the eyes and ears are not! When you're shooting with a high ISO your images can get really noisy, especially in low light, but I was working in really strong direct sunlight so I had room to mess around with settings. (You can push this too far. I accidentally took a bunch of baby elephant pool wrestling photos on 12000 ISO because I was exhausted and forgot to reset after messing with settings in a really dark reptile house. There's a reason those aren't online.)
I also just want to point out that I am also fairly new at photography overall - I've only really been doing animal photography seriously for the last three years - and that a lot of what will help you get better is trial and error. I have two photography mentors who are both super technical guys and they repeatedly tried to explain the exposure triangle theory to me (the relationship between ISO, aperture, and shutter speed). It never stuck. Y'know what did? Taking a truly astounding number of photos and just messing around with my settings until it started making sense. I shoot with all my settings on manual now, but I absolutely did not start there.
So even as a beginner you too can learn to use ridiculous settings! Find a thing you want to photograph, put the settings where you think they need to be to get what you want. Get enough photos to make you happy, and then change one setting a little bit and try again. I suggest using auto settings where you only have to pick a value for one setting manually and then the camera automatically adjusts the other two for the best photo. Play with a couple adjustments to the same setting on the same subject so you can compare the photos. Over time, it really will start to make sense and come more naturally. And then you can join me in the "your shutter speed was what?" club!
If you want to take higher aperture macro photos without hitting ISO numbers like that, I cannot recommend enough using a flash unit. Even(and honestly especially!) in sunlight. The flash even gives you room to knock the shutterspeed down-- I've gotten beautiful "freeze-frame" shots working at 250.
(ISO 100, F11, 1/250)
(ISO 100, F11, 1/250) (dont be fooled, this guy was not actually sitting still)
(okay this ones mainly just here because its funny) (ISO 200, F13(ish, manual aperture ring so some fudgy inbetween value), 1/250)
I only say this because high ISO plus a high aperture is a surefire recipe for fuzzed out photos-- As you raise your aperture value, once you hit the diffraction point, your resolution begins to go down, which when combined with the noise can be a huge pain.
(Though that also depends on your lens. I could get up to F32 on my nikkor without the resolution getting too bad, but F16 and above on my laowa are a pain. Such is life)
The increased clarity of lower ISO can be worth it in my opinion cause you can get stuff like this
See, this is a person who knows more than I do about macro photography!
I had not thought about trying flash - you canât use them at zoos so it hadnât crossed my mind for wildlife.
They are really right about the combination of high aperture and ISO making things grainy. I was able to push to F10 there because of the lens I was using, but I couldnât go much further and smaller glass wouldnât work at those settings at all.
Lovely photos and thank you for chiming in!




















