Scoliid Wasp
A walk on the wild side So, here I am in May 2008 wandering the back country of Porto Heli Bay on the Peleponesse peninsula of Greece, trying out my new VR 70-200mm zoom, when an enormous insect whizzed past my head and rested on various olive trees nearby. In researching for todays blog (thank-you Wikipedia), I believe it to be a Scoliid wasp :"Megascolia maculate flavifrons". In my humble opinion - whatever it was - it was "Mega". I will talk through the processing to the image below, but note that viewing it on a 22' screen, it is only about 25% larger than life. Technique I was operating on automatic pilot, since I had no idea of how long the wasp would stay in view. I hurried over to the edge of the field and, since I had been taking a quiet walk, capturing the landscape at low ISO and consequent low speeds of exposure, I had to adapt to speed photography for this moving object. I had little experience of sports photography and was uncomfortable to change focus mode without reference to the manual. I made the best "reflex" choices in the circumstances, by upping ISO to 640 and switching to continuous high image capture. However I stayed with my habitual preference for aperture priority, which I kept at f8 and I monitored the speed enabled by bright Spring sunlight. These choices were surely not optimum, but they still turned out to be quite useful. The increased depth of field from f8 gave a degree of flexibility for focussing error and the speed of 1/1000 second allowed a reasonably high certainty of motion capture. The speed choice turns out to be a fair compromise, in that since wasps beat their wings at 400 times per second, I figure that the image above captured about 0.3 beats of its wing (given my fuzzy math). My D300 would have captured at up to 1/8000s, but this would have entailed significant higher ISO and/or larger aperture compromises that would have required extremely precise focussing and/or reduced image quality to a much more grainy and/or dark level. All of which is to say that my "automatic pilot" decisions permitted me to quite aggressively process the original image to the one which follows
I used only a small amount of noise reduction, thanks to ISO 640, but applied aggressive cropping and sharpening. The result is reasonably good overall with a pleasing sense of the insect's energy in flight, thanks to the "inadequate" speed of 1/1000 and wonderful bokeh in the background thanks to the optics of the zoom at its full extension of 200mm.
Travel advisory
If you want a peaceful holiday in an idyllic place at a modest expenditure, you can do a lot worse than take the Flying Dolphin from Piraeus to Porto Heli and stay at the Nautica Bay Hotel. I have been welcomed there many times by George and his staff. A wonderful way to be personally happy and do some good for Greece.
Copyright Paul Grayson 2013
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