On Friday the 18th, I slept late, as I had had a long day on my birding excursion to the Nicola Valley and Kamloops the day before. Once I was out of the house, I ran a few errands, and in the late afternoon I found some free time and headed over to Century Gardens, which is a smallish flower garden next to the Shadbolt Arts Centre, part of the big Burnaby municipal complex by Deer Lake.

I was looking, of course, for flowers and insects, more fodder for my macrophotography explorations. Despite it being a sunny day, I took my lights; using just the sunlight would have meant slower shutter speeds, which could mean blurry insects. Besides which, with the lights I didn't need to worry if my subject was in shade or not, or how strong the cast shadows were. Lighiting is such a big consideration in photography that not really having to worry too much about it was a liberating feeling.

So, feeling thusly liberated, I did a short walk through the gardens and found a few macro subjects. I was more interested in experimentation than with getting a large range of photos, so I ended up with photos of only a few subjects. The first thing that caught my eye was a bed full of nice flowers with orange petals and a yellow centre. I've been seeing lots of these flowers, but haven't yet figured out what they are.

update, 21 December 2006:

My email correspondent Hilary informed me that my flowers are Gazanias (Treasure Flowers). They seem to be Gazania rigens, quite possibly the Kiss cultivar.

There were lots of flying insects visiting this flower bed, and so I spent a fair amount of time next to it taking photos of them.

My first insect subject was a small (6-7mm) fly that didn't light on the flowers themselves, but rather on a nearby leaf. He wasn't there long, and I only got one distant (relatively speaking) photo of him. The angle I had turned out bad for my light placement, and so I ended up with serious reflection problems in the photo.

I really liked the insect, though, so rather than discarding the photo I toned the reflections down a bit in Photoshop. They're still a little too much, but at least you can see why I liked this guy. His color is remarkable: metallic blue on the head, metallic green on the abdomen and front leg. Furthermore, the metallic green on the abdomen is spotted—green spots on a black background. Add to that the contrasting orange grains of pollen, and you've got one vivid fly.

He flew off quickly, and despite my trying to follow him, he quickly lost me. Flies are pretty hard to track.

I mean, it's not like they leave footprints in the mud that you can follow or anything.

Keeping an eye out in case my fly or one of his relatives came by again, I turned my attention to the insects buzzing around the orange flowers. The most common of these were Honeybees, and they were the only ones that I ended up with good photos of. The others just didn't stay put long enough for me to move the camera in on them and get it focussed.

Anyhow, here's a Honeybee on one of these flowers.

I was using my general purpose (24-120mm) lens on an extension ring for these photos, as I didn't yet have an adapter for fitting my lights to my macro lens. As you can see, though, I didn't really suffer much in the quality department for this arrangement; I'm getting excellent detail and no noticable color fringing.

Here's another Honeybee on another of these flowers. On this one, you can clearly see the big orange pollen sacs on the hind legs. I'm not surprised the sacs were so swollen; these flowers seemed to be putting off lots of pollen.

The following bee (or maybe he's a wasp) had come by the flowerbed above, and I was so taken by him that I followed him over to some Rudbeckias in an adjacent planter. I was never able to get as close up on him as I did on the Honeybees, though. The thing I found interesting about him was the white stripes on his dark abdomen. I'd never seen that in a bee before.

I like that one because the left half of the photo is still and sharp, and the right half of the photo, due to the depth of field, is blurred and almost looks like its in motion. It's a very odd effect.

That did it for my photos that day, as I had a few more errands to run and then a nap to take.

Your green bee finder,
Tom