Making the Light: Flash Macro, and a Field Guide I Have Been Quietly Planning

For twelve years I have photographed insects the way most people do: find the animal, find the light, hope they agree with each other. Usually they don’t. A bee lands in shade, or the sun is behind it, or it is moving faster than the shutter speed the light will allow. You take four hundred frames and keep three.

Over the last two days I started making the light instead of finding it, and it has changed what I am able to photograph.

There is also a short film at the bottom of this page, if you would rather watch the bees than read about the lighting.

The Setup

A Godox AD200Pro on a light stand, off camera, with the bare bulb head and a round diffuser. The camera is a Fujifilm X-H2, forty megapixels, with a macro lens. That is the whole rig, and none of it is exotic.

The bare bulb matters more than it sounds like it should. It throws light in nearly every direction, so the diffuser turns it into a source that wraps around the subject instead of hitting it from one side. That is why the underside of that bee has shadow detail rather than a hard black edge.

Four Things Flash Solves at Once

It freezes the animal. And here is the part that surprised me: the shutter speed is not what does it. On a flash-lit subject, the flash duration is the real exposure — and at low power this strobe fires in something like one ten-thousandth of a second. My camera’s flash sync tops out at 1/400. Push past that and you photograph the shutter curtain itself, a dark band across the frame. It turns out I never needed to. A bee frozen by a short flash pulse is frozen whether the shutter was open for 1/400 or 1/200.

The counterintuitive rule that follows: turn the power down on purpose. Lower power means a shorter pulse, and a shorter pulse means a sharper bee.

It lets me shoot at base ISO, which means no AI noise reduction. This is the one I care about most. Some of my older macro work went through AI denoise, and it came out looking like a painting — smooth in a way that insects are not. There is a reason for that. Denoise tools work by predicting what should be there and filling it in, and on a bee the fine texture is the subject. Individual hairs, the pitting on an exoskeleton, the striping in an eye. The algorithm can’t tell those from noise and averages them away. Enough light means nothing to clean up, and nothing invented.

It buys depth of field. At macro distances the plane of focus is a couple of millimetres deep. Stopping the aperture down is the only way to get a whole bee sharp from antenna to abdomen, and stopping down costs light — light the flash can simply supply.

And it brings out the colour in the wings. Those rainbows are not an effect. An insect wing is a membrane a fraction of a micron thick, and light reflecting off its top and bottom surfaces interferes with itself — some wavelengths reinforce, others cancel. The colour has no pigment in it at all. It is the same physics as an oil slick on a wet street. Entomologists call the result a wing interference pattern, and it only appears against a dark background with a small, directional light source. Which is exactly what a bare bulb close in produces.

What It Cost

Two afternoons standing in eighty-degree heat with my back to the sun.

Five in the afternoon is when these bees are at their fastest, and there is a reason for that too. Bees are ectotherms — their flight muscles will not fire properly until the thorax reaches somewhere near thirty degrees Celsius. Warmth is fuel. At seven in the morning they are sluggish and will sit still for you. At five in the evening, at eighty degrees, they are running at maximum and you are chasing them.

I noticed the males were noticeably quicker on the second afternoon than the first. It was warmer. That is not a coincidence; that is the physics.

The Bees

All of these are long-horned bees, genus Melissodes, on Douglas aster at Oaks Bottom in August. The plant is Symphyotrichum subspicatum, the common native purple aster of the Willamette Valley, and it is one of the last significant blooms of the year. These bees time their entire adult lives to it.

That is not laziness, it is anatomy. He has no scopa — none of the dense pollen-carrying brushes the female wears on her hind legs. He physically cannot carry pollen. No male bee of this kind ever has.

She is digging and provisioning a burrow entirely alone, against a bloom that has perhaps six weeks left in it. No colony, no workers, nobody to cover a bad day. Everything on that leg is groceries for a larva she will never meet.

And here is the detail I keep thinking about. She is faster than he is. She is hauling close to half her body weight in pollen and she still outruns him. He has no cargo, no burrow, nothing to deliver anywhere. He flies slowly because he has nowhere in particular to be.

And One I Cannot Name Yet

Those three simple eyes form no image at all. The two large compound eyes on the sides do the seeing; the ocelli work as light meters and horizon detectors, telling her how bright the sky is and which way is up. Almost every bee has them and almost nobody notices.

This one is a cuckoo bee, genus Stelis — a cleptoparasite. She builds nothing and gathers no pollen. She sneaks into the sealed nest cells of other bees, lays her egg on their provisions, and her larva eats both the food and the host’s young. When you see her on a flower she is only drinking nectar to fuel herself. She visits the flowers, but she takes nothing home.

I photographed another yellow-and-black bee on the same aster patch that I genuinely cannot identify yet. Three different AI models gave me three different answers, which was clarifying in its own way. I have sent it off for a real opinion. That is how this works, and I would rather say “I don’t know yet” than put a wrong name on a photograph.

There Is Video, Too

Flash is no use for video — you need continuous light — so this is natural light, which meant that punishing five o’clock heat was suddenly an advantage. Bright sun, peak bee activity.

Music: “To a Wild Rose” by Edward MacDowell, played by me on my seven-foot Yamaha. Ambient nature sound is stock, from Final Cut Pro. Footage shot at 4K and slowed to half speed, mixed with stills.

What This Is All Building Toward

I have been quietly working on something larger, and this is the first time I have said it out loud.

I want a page for every species I photograph at Oaks Bottom. Not a blog post that scrolls away — a permanent page, one per animal, that I keep adding to for years. Working title: The Birds and Bees of Oaks Bottom.

Each page would carry the same handful of things:

• My best photograph of the species — and both sexes, side by side, wherever they look different. Most guides show one and move on. The male and female long-horned bees above are exactly why that is a mistake.
• What months you will actually find it
• Where at Oaks Bottom, and at what hour. This is the part a national field guide cannot do. Cornell’s page on the great blue heron is excellent and it cannot tell you which bend in the trail to stand at in November. I can.
• How to tell it apart from the thing it gets confused with
• One fact worth knowing

Birds and bees are the focus, because there are a great many of both — Oaks Bottom’s bird list runs to around two hundred species, and Oregon has something like seven hundred native bees. Plants, trees and mammals will get mentioned where they belong rather than pages of their own. A guide to one refuge that you can walk in an afternoon is a better promise than a guide to everything.

It will take years. It does not matter — each page is useful the day it goes up, and I am not in a hurry. The field guide already exists in a small way, and this is where it is heading.

Two days of standing in the heat with a strobe got me eleven species’ worth of material and a much better idea of what I am building. That seems like a reasonable trade.