Hover Fly

Imagine the cost of that little lot in the pre-digital days of film ! ! !

Chances are you would not have taken 40 goes at it.

Great pic.

Quite right Peter, wouldn't have even tried. That was one of the reasons I convinced myself to 'go' digital - I kept seeing potential images, that may or may not have worked, and thinking "if I had a digital camera...".

And I justified the initial expense of the camera, lenses, memory cards and storage device by saying "I've taken 3500 images so far, if I'd been using film that would have cost me £750", and so on, until I got to about 5000 shots, when I reckon I was back in the black, so to speak. It's paid for itself a few times over now, using this method.

Cheers,
Dan

P.S. Loved your moth, by the way.

Anybody suggest trap-focus?

You set the camera on manual focus, use a manual focus lens or the manual focus ring on your autofocus lens, and set it up so as you track the quarry, when it enters the focus distance you've set the shutter goes off.

national gegraphic used to send a photographer out to a locale with a crew and several hundred rolls of film.
200-300 rolls times 36 shots per roll to get 8-14 images ofr a feature story.
One outa forty doesn't sound so bad for a tough shot if you ask me.

Don, that's why I said "I think I was lucky"! I was also lazy, because although the composition was poor, I didn't try too hard to get a better one, thinking it would be easy enough to digitally move the fly if need be:



Original



Moved

Arthur, Brian mentioned this a little further back in the post, and I might have tried it, if it weren't for two considerations:

1. I was using an AF lens, which is by far the best one I have for macro work, and you can't disable the AF on the lens, so this method wouldn't have worked with this lens. (You of course meant to say 'set the body to auto-focus...' ).

2. I'm not sure that the shutter would fire quick enough to get the insect in focus, as it, and my arm, were moving. I think the focus would have drifted out by the time the shutter actually opened. But then I didn't try it, so it might have been fine.

I have used this method for getting birds in flight using my Tamron 300mm lens, with some success.

I've also read of someone who made a metal wire frame, which attached to the camera somehow, which you set to the distance you were focused on, and the when the insect is within the frame, it's in focus so you trip the shutter. Does that make sense? Here's a picture




The rectangular frame around the insect would obviously need to be bigger than the image area.

It seems like a sound idea, and it worked for this guy with photos of Bees, but I don't know whether hoverflies would be happy with the frame around them.

Anyway, enough of my rambling.

Dan