I for one would be very interested to know the set up and process.
Here we go Mark, the capture phase in this post, post processing in the next.
I may skate over some details. If you questions about Why? How? What about ... etc please do say.
The wasp nest (I assume it was a nest) was in a wall at the back of the house.
1361 1 P1010587_DxO RAW LR7 1400h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
Here is the hole the wasps were flying in and out of. There was a lot of traffic; not completely continuous but rarely more than a 10 second or so gap, often much shorter, and quite often several wasps buzzing around. The wasps came quite close to me, inevitably so as I was fairly close to the hole, but they only touched me a couple of times. (One got caught in my hair a couple of days later, but after I made a quick exit shaking my head it had gone.)
1361 3 P1010594_DxO RAW LR7 1400h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
In this case I used a tripod. This was optional. A couple of days later I did a session hand-held.
1361 4 P1010596_DxO RAW LR7 1400h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
1361 5 P1010597_DxO RAW LR7 1400h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
I used a Panasonic FZ330 small sensor bridge camera with a Raynox 150 close-up lens. There was nothing special about this particular setup. A couple of days later I had three sessions using micro four thirds cameras, one with a Raynox 150, one with a less powerful Canon 500D close-up lens and one with an Olympus 60mm macro lens. When I last did this, in 2015, I used an ASP-C dSLR as well as micro four thirds and small sensor bridge cameras.
1361 6 P1010600_DxO RAW LR7 1400h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
I used a Venus Optics KX800 twin flash with home made diffusers. There was nothing special about this particular flash setup. In my August 2015 wasp nest sessions I think at least some of the sessions used a single flash unit, something like this.
0739 1 P1020615 600h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
I think August 2015 was when I first got a KX800 so if I did use it for some of the 2015 sessions it would have been with early version diffusers that were less effective than the current arrangement which has several layers of diffusion (one of polystyrene and a couple of some sort of “plastic paper”) for each flash head, and a large single concave diffuser (also made from plastic paper) hanging in front of the head diffusers.
1361 7 P1010605_DxO RAW LR7 1400h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
The KX800 is a manual flash. That is fine with me as the flash power levels are easy to control with separate up and down buttons for each flash head on the back of the control unit, and I find I get more consistent illumination with manual control. There again, I might have used TTL flash for some of the 2015 sessions.
As with the rest of my cameras, I used the LCD, with an LCD hood, rather than the viewfinder (which I pretty much only use for birds in flight).
1361 8 P1010606_DxO RAW LR7 1400h by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
So as far as the equipment goes, what I happened to use for this session is not important. You could do this sort of capturing with all manner of equipment.
As to technique, that was much less open-ended. I almost always use autofocus for close-up/macro. In this case though that was entirely impractical. The problem is that these wasps move fast – very fast. I found in 2015 that even when using phase detect focusing it was not fast enough. By and large (at least for me, perhaps it would be different for people with extremely fast reactions), if I could see a subject in the right place in the viewfinder I had left it too late – by the time the image was captured the wasp would have disappeared. I suppose the phase detect focusing might have been fast enough, but my reactions certainly were not. And apart from my dSLR all my cameras have slower contrast detect focusing (as does my dSLR when used in live view mode using the LCD, which is how I prefer to use it). Autofocus, for me, was impractical.
So, I had to use manual focus. There is obviously not enough time to manually adjust the focus for individual shots so I had to fix the focus at a suitable distance and try to capture wasps while they were around the plane of focus. Here too the wasps moved so fast (and additionally there was lag on the LCD screen) that for the most part waiting until a wasp was in the frame and then shooting did not work. Much more often than not the image would have nothing in it, and for most of the rest the wasp was either not suitably or even at all in all in focus and/or partly out of the frame. (Some of the odd compositions in the final images arose from captures where the subject was very close to the edge of the frame.)
With wasps emerging from the hole I could see them coming out to the entrance, not yet in flight. Even so it was unpredictable as to exactly when they would take flight, and if I waited until they took off I would have missed the shot. Timing the shots was therefore largely guesswork. And even more so for incoming wasps, which arrived on the scene with no warning. I had some periods when I just gave up trying to catch the action and just kept pressing the shutter button as fast as the flash recyle time would let me. As an indication of just how fast the wasps were moving there were plenty of occasions when I pressed the shutter button with an empty scene and ended up with a wasp, or two, or three, in the scene (occasionally with one of them actually in focus).
One of the things that obviously matters in these circumstances is the depth of field. The wider it is the more likely you are to catch a subject within it. For invertebrates I normally use the smallest available apertures in order to maximise the depth of field, so my normal use of very small apertures fitted well with this sort of scene. There are downsides with using very small apertures, and implications for post processing. These issues are discussed in
this post above.
As a result of the randomness and very high failure rate of the capture process I ended up capturing a lot of images; for this session around 1700 over the course of two sessions totalling about an hour. So this was about one capture every two seconds on average. Of those 1700 I kept 16, so the success rate was something under 1%. These numbers can obviously vary. Two days later I had another session, with different equipment, working hand-held, and in 35 minutes I captured around 700 images, about one every three seconds. In that case I made less use of entirely random shooting and, possibly as a consequence of that, and possibly not, I had a higher success rate with 27 kept (posted in
this album at Flickr) out of the 700, a success rate of approaching 4%. On the other hand, the poses and combinations of wasps I captured were not as appealing to my eye as some of those in the top post of this thread. Partly this is because, even after cropping, the wasps were smaller in the frame for the second session, and the hairs less clearly defined. On the other hand the lesser magnification may have contributed to the increased success rate. I don't know – there are a lot of variables by way of equipment and technique combined with a huge amount of randomness involved in what is in the frame at the instant an image is captured.
The FZ330, like the FZ200, has a leaf shutter (or so it seems, Panasonic have never confirmed this) which means that ordinary (non FP/HSS) flash can be used with fast shutter speeds. This time with the FZ330 I used 1/1000 sec (and 1/800 by accident for some of them). Where flash is the dominant light source the shutter speed isn't relevant because the effective shutter speed is the length of the flash pulse, which with ordinary flash will be faster than 1/1000 sec (unlike with HSS/FP flash where the flash pulse lasts as long as the exposure). However, if the flash light is not entirely dominant then shutter speed can matter, with a slower exposure softening up an image because of the natural light component acting over a longer period, which would be especially relevant for fast moving subjects like these wasps. I do wonder whether that might be one reason for the apparent (to my eye at least) greater sharpness of the FZ330 images compared to the second session's images which were captured at the Panasonic G5's maximum flash sync speed of 1/160 sec.
I used ISO 100 and 200 with the FZ330. I prefer to keep the ISO to 100 because the FZ330's small sensor is quite noisy, even at base ISO of 100, especially if you are raising shadows, which I often do. However in this case I raised the ISO to 200 after a while so as to lower the flash level by a stop so as to get faster flash recycling. With micro four thirds cameras like the G5 the minimum aperture is f/22, three stops smaller than the minimum aperture of f/8 on the FZ330. In order to get the same flash recycling speed as for ISO 100 with the FZ330 I used ISO 800 with the G5, which has noise characteristics very similar to ISO 100 on the FZ330.
Next post – post processing