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UltravioletPhotography

Some bees on dandelions


Stefano

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Any suggestions on tags?

 

Today I photographed some bees busy pollinating some dandelions (I think they are dandelions, but there are so many species all very similar...). I had to use high ISOs to keep the shutter speed fast, as bees move around quite a bit as they do their job.

 

The camera was my Canon EOS M, the lens was the Soligor and the filter was my usual one, ZWB2 (2 mm) + Chinese BG39 (2 mm). Most photos were taken wide opoen at f/3.5, some were taken at f/5.6 but I don't know which they are as the camera doesn't know the lens aperture and writes f/0 as a "null" value.

 

ISO 25600, 1/100 s exposure.

post-284-0-04047200-1615668765.jpg

 

ISO 25600, 1/40 s exposure.

post-284-0-94008100-1615668859.jpg

 

ISO 25600, 1/40 s exposure.

post-284-0-49878100-1615668868.jpg

 

ISO 25600, 1/100 s exposure.

post-284-0-09093000-1615668919.jpg

 

ISO 25600, 1/100 s exposure.

post-284-0-38842600-1615668934.jpg

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Good to see you are getting some good results with your new UV capable camera.

I guess these are taken under Sunlight ?

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Andy Perrin
The tags that we have hardly make any sense but my proposal to reform them didn’t seem to get any affection.
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Good to see you are getting some good results with your new UV capable camera.

I guess these are taken under Sunlight ?

Yes, that was sunlight.
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The tags that we have hardly make any sense but my proposal to reform them didn’t seem to get any affection.

I too think the tags should be updated. I understand that from Andrea's side that's a lot of boring and time-consuming work, because then every topic on the forum (and there's a lot of them!) will have to be re-tagged accordingly. But UVP is growing and changing and the tags need a major update.

 

This site was born around UV photography, I don't know exactly its history but it was initially about UV and botanics (flowers). That's why there is still a botanical section with formal entries and so on. The entite infrared section here is a sub-forum where informal posts are accepted, so it is clearly of less importance. I mean, this forum is called ultravioletphotography.com!

 

But now I think that UVP is really about multispectral photography in general, it is about photography beyond visible light in both directions, we currently have from UVC to LWIR, with examples somewhere of microwaves and transmitted X-rays, and maybe in the future we will have even more (I don't know if and when I will try THz waves, not in the near future for sure).

 

So in my opinion the tags shouldn't be so much weighted towards UV, they should be broader and more balanced. If everyone will help re-tagging his/her own topics this will speed-up the process a lot.

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Back to bees... today if I can I will try again in IR and see how they come out. Then I will put a multispectral tag on the topic (I am not doing IR on purpose to tag the topic, but I wanted to do it since yesterday and I didn't yet).
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Stefano - you might find it helpful to get a flashgun to help with subjects like this. A Wansen WS560 is cheap, powerful, and easy to remove the lens. (A Yongnuo YN560 would be better in terms of build quality, if you can find a good secondhand one.)
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And here the IR version. The aperture was f/8 for most images. I did push f/11 for some of them (I don't know if they are present in this post), but nothing tighter as I know diffraction would have affected the images. Also, I have some dust on the sensor which is visible in the images. Last time I cleaned it the best I could, I cleaned the rear lens element and left the lens mounted to keep it sealed.

 

Filter: Hoya R72

 

ISO 100, 1/500 s exposure.

post-284-0-16281000-1615729114.jpg

 

ISO 400, 1/250 s exposure.

post-284-0-21017400-1615729167.jpg

 

ISO 400, 1/500 s exposure.

post-284-0-90844100-1615729179.jpg

 

ISO 400, 1/500 s exposure.

post-284-0-09550800-1615729262.jpg

 

ISO 400, 1/500 s exposure.

post-284-0-87903800-1615729370.jpg

 

ISO 400, 1/500 s exposure.

post-284-0-36247700-1615729462.jpg

 

The colors are not strong, so I decided to play with them a little in the last image.

 

This is how it looks like with saturation pushed all the way, and then again half way in IrfanView:

post-284-0-75046000-1615729565.jpg

 

And the BGR of the above image, simulating very vaguely a tri-color IR image:

post-284-0-16362700-1615729628.jpg

 

I really like the honey-colored bee.

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Stefano - you might find it helpful to get a flashgun to help with subjects like this. A Wansen WS560 is cheap, powerful, and easy to remove the lens. (A Yongnuo YN560 would be better in terms of build quality, if you can find a good secondhand one.)

I might consider this in the future, but for now I am OK with how the UV images come out.
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Stefano - you might find it helpful to get a flashgun to help with subjects like this. A Wansen WS560 is cheap, powerful, and easy to remove the lens. (A Yongnuo YN560 would be better in terms of build quality, if you can find a good secondhand one.)

 

I'm quite happy with my fulls-spectrum YN560III for the flower shots and am eagerly awaiting spring proper to try my hand at insects.

 

Stefano, very good images :bee:

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Some more, same filters/camera/lens as before. I decided to process the IR images the same way as the bee image in the last set. I increased the saturation to the max (256) in IrfanView, and then an additional 128, and I swapped the blue and green channels (BGR). There's more color noise than last time, and I don't know why. Also you can see a slight color shift at the corners, but I heavily increased the saturation. I worked with the .JPGs, but I also have the .CR2s, so I may re-try in the future.

 

UV:

 

f/3.5(?), ISO 3200, 1/125 s exposure.

post-284-0-02020700-1615894786.jpg

 

ISO 25600, 1/60 s exposure.

post-284-0-87895500-1615894862.jpg

 

f/3.5 (?), ISO 6400, 1/60 s exposure.

post-284-0-54645200-1615894945.jpg

 

IR:

 

ISO 100, 1/1000 s exposure. Those are the same flowers in the second image.

post-284-0-13438300-1615895351.jpg

 

ISO 100, 1/1000 s exposure.

post-284-0-78184700-1615895400.jpg

 

I then "zoomed-in" the lens all the way, to the maximum magnification, because I wanted to see how much I could magnify the bees. Here the results:

 

f/11 (?), ISO 1600, 1/1250 s exposure.

post-284-0-93952300-1615895655.jpg

 

f/11 (?), ISO 1600, 1/800 s exposure.

post-284-0-37889200-1615895693.jpg

 

f/11 (?), ISO 1600, 1/1250 s exposure.

post-284-0-01449400-1615895722.jpg

 

Also, excuse me for all that dust! I'll clean the sensor now. Is it possible that dust is entering from the helicoid or somewhere else? It should be a tight seal...

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Nice contributions. I'm not surprised you get tangible noise if you work directly on the jpgs .... Much better to start with the RAW files. In that manner you are ensured much better control not only over w/b and noise, but the general ability to process your UV- or IR-images towards the outcome you desire. You might require Photoshop or something in that vein to get the optimal results, though. These days a number of alternatives to Photoshop exist and some are low-cost or free software.
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