Flight of the bumblebee

For this photograph of a bumblebee flying towards a common foxglove flower at Commonwork I used a shutter speed of 1/1000 second to stop the movement, an aperture of f10 to increase the depth of field and no flash. The title is from Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

I needed to use a fast shutter speed because I wasn’t using a tripod and a breeze was moving the flower. I took a similar photograph using my camera’s built-in flash but the flower looked very flat because the flash removed all of the shadows.

A small amount of image editing removed a couple of unwanted highlights including one at the tip of the left wing. Careful cropping has placed the bee to the left of the photograph and has given it space to fly in to.