Tiny Tuesday

I've messed around with this much longer than I should! You may realise that it's not quite what it looks like at first sight, as I don't think a bee usually keeps its wings open when sucking up nectar or gathering pollen.

So in fact the bee is sadly a dead one which my Editor found in the house 2 or 3 days ago, but knowing what I'm like she asked me if I wanted it for a blip (silly question!). So I kept it for the TT challenge today. I thought it would look best in a natural environment rather than sitting on my desk - finding a suitable dandelion in the garden was unsurprisingly no problem. I then set it up indoors. The bee was a bit unsteady(!) and for a moment it went face down into the pollen in the middle of the flower so I had to dust its eyes with a soft paintbrush (the rest of the pollen wouldn't easily come off). I wanted a macro shot so went for a focus stack to get as much as possible in focus at once. Blip done - at last! (Oh, and the blue sky was added afterwards from my collection of skies - there hasn't been much blue here today.)

(A bit more tech: The OM1 can focus stack 15 layers in camera but I wanted to use more layers than that, so this is 40 layers focus bracketed in camera and stacked in Affinity.)

Thanks of course to Incredibish for hosting the challenge.