Wasp In Flight

It's been a good six weeks since my week of vacation took me to both Ottawa and Mt. Tremblant and I'm still trying to work my way through all of the photographs that I took.  I've been sorting them first by day, and later by subject as I try and make it easier to be able to locate specific photos.  Such as these wasps.  I'll be perfectly honest, while I have grown in time to appreciate and even like Bumblebee's, I still have no appreciation for the wasp.  They still bother me to this day. This may or may not have something to do with two tragic encounters that a much younger Eric may have had

with wasp nests during his younger years.  I see them as a pest, even if they do serve as being a very effective predator to other insects that are also considered to be pest.  While I won't be keeping any as pets, and will probably continue to shoo them away when they show up uninvited to dinner, they do make good subjects for photography.  This particular wasp, like I could really tell them apart, had been harassing myself and My Lovely Assistant whenever we tried to eat on the deck outside.  However, one afternoon it found the flowers next to the deck to be a little more interesting than us.  It even brought a little friend along as well.  This allowed me to pull out my telephoto lens and begin to shoot away.   With wasp, as with most insects, animals and critters, you can't really ask them to sit still and smile.  Many humans don't react all that well to those instructions either.  What I tried to do in order to get the best possible photos was focus on a general area and shooting in Burst mode, which fires off several photographs in a matter of seconds.  The result is what led to the partial backlog in photographs that I have been fighting through, but it also allowed to me to catch this great photos of the wasp in flight, going from flower to flower.  The first photo in this group is probably my favourite as it is one of the few where I actually caught a look at the face of the wasp.  I also like how he appears to be headed from the flower in the background to the flower in the foreground.  This picture was shot at f/5.6, 1/500sec, ISO 100 at 300mm.  The second photograph of the wasp in flight was shot at f/5.6, 1/400sec, ISO 100 at 300mm.  The third photograph was taken at f/5.6, 1/250sec, ISO 100 at 300mm.  I like the flight of the wasp in both of these photos, but especially the third one where the hind legs are very visible and you can see the wings fluttering in flight.  The final two photographs included a bit of a little surprise that I only noticed when I took the time to look at them more closely after we had gotten home.

f/5.6, 1/500sec, ISO 100 at 300mm

If you'll notice along the stem of the flower on the left, there is a little 'baby' wasp flying around

f/5.6, 1/500sec, ISO 100 at 300mm

The little guy gets a photo of his own.

I've often complained about that fact that my telephoto lens can't shoot at 300mm with an aperture any larger than f/5.6, but in this case, it's a good thing.  I have the tendency to shoot at higher apertures with my macro shots, but had I done so in this case, I might not have caught the wasp as it was moving so fast and would have probably found itself in a part of the frame that wouldn't have been in focus.  I also would have probably never found the little wasp in the fourth picture as it would have likely been out of focus as well.  Score one for the telephoto.