Bee with my new 50mm!!

[Bo_]

I just got my new canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens (my wife said I could buy it - she was probably fed up with my talk about it). I went into the garden to try it out - to get the feel of the fast lens.
There were a lot of bees on the flowers near our terrace so I tried to catch a picture of one of them - even thou the lens is not directly a macro lens. Normally the bees are very fast moving - but this one was moving in slow motion - why I don’t know? Maybe it was on vacation? But anyhow the slow movement made it easy to take a nice picture of the small creature.

I cropped it (a lot!) and enhanced the dark colours.

What do you think?
- How would you compose the picture (the rule of third?)?

Exposure: 1/640s, Aperture: f/2.8, Focal Length: 50 mm, ISO Speed: 200

[amy57689]

Bo
I like the composition its that background that is distracting to me. My eye tends to focus on the purple petal on the left instead of the bee. Overall, I like the picture and am very envious of your new lense. Someday I will have mine, someday.

[davidmario]

The bee looks fantastic in that shot. I like the cropping but I do agree that the background is slightly distracting but it's not like you can set up and plan out a shot for something like that. Good capture.

[Bo_]

amy57689 and davidmario many thanks for the critique - and I can also see the problem - the background really distracts.

I looked on my photos from that photo-shoot and found this shot - where the background is almost without distractions:



And regarding the composition - here I tried to use the rule of third where the eye(-s) are in the left-top third corner!

EXIF: Exposure: 1/500s, Aperture: f/2.5, Focal Length: 50 mm, ISO Speed: 200

[Nathan deGargoyle]

The second one is a great improvement. The bee is much more prominent whereas in the bfirst it sort of looks like an adjunct to the flower.

[amy57689]

Yes I like this one very much. The bee is very beautiful, yet scary.

[davidmario]

I was actually looking through your other photos and was going to reccomend using some of the others. Good choice. The bee definitely stands out a lot more now.

[penquist]

I love the shot! I don't find the flower distracting...but a great part of the overall pic!

[corry]

wonderful shot.......although i am beephobic i do love taking pictures of them and seeing others.. i prefer the second one over the first but both are well done.

[The Bing]

The 2nd shot is awesome!

I guess I need to start saving fup so I can get that lens. WOW