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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Bees and a Nikon macro lens

Oh my god! Those are very interesting shots! Is it me or the lens seems a bit low contrast? (EDIT : Or maybe you could polarize those bees, if you didn't already.)

Anyway, kudos to you. I'm certainly not brave enough to shove my hand in a buzzing ball of bees! They know I'm scared and definitely don't like it.

Don't the bees mind the camera's presence? The fans, the vibration, the heat?
 
Bees on RED

Bees on RED

A Wasp shot with the RED 18-50 CF zoom.
1402_1213154133.jpg
 
Looks amazing! The more I see with still lenses the more I like!

Great job!
 
One of our other guys shot it last weekend- So I'm just guessing at these answers:

Hey, just wondering why you would shoot 2k at 60fps, when you can do 3k at 60? Was it because you were using 16mm lenses?

Looks great though.

Matthew

I know we've been getting codec errors when we shoot 4k 16x9, so there may have been some issues with 3k. However shooting 3k is still new to us build wise (we've been hooked on 4k since build 12) so we don't shoot it that much. Kind of an organic decision if that makes sense.

The KoNE said:
Oh my god! Those are very interesting shots! Is it me or the lens seems a bit low contrast? (EDIT : Or maybe you could polarize those bees, if you didn't already.)

Anyway, kudos to you. I'm certainly not brave enough to shove my hand in a buzzing ball of bees! They know I'm scared and definitely don't like it.

Don't the bees mind the camera's presence? The fans, the vibration, the heat?

The contrast issue is probably my fault- Everything looks good on my cinema display, but I don't have a monitor to color with, so I've noticed that I really blast the detail sometimes. My favorite shot is the bees getting smoked out, because you can actually see that their abdomen is semi-transparent- the detail is amazing, and i didn't mess with the shot too much.

The bees are pretty docile- they're domesticated so I think that even if they sting it's not very bad.
 
A Wasp shot with the RED 18-50 CF zoom.
IMAGE: http://www.reduser.net/forum/uploaded/1402_1213154133.jpg

Wow! Was that as close as you could get without losing focus? We have the 18-50 but we've only shot people with it. I'll have to play around with some extreme CUs.

The Nikon lens we used was a little faster than the Red lens, and we wanted to test out the lens mount- We did some LensBaby tests with it as well. It makes everything look creepy.
 
The RED 18-50 can be focused down to 8". The wasp was shot at 2K @ 72fps, 1/144 shutter speed at f/16 (to reduce DOF). Still, pulling focus on the little bugger was a bitch!
 
Nice Macros!

Here's one I shot in Panama, it's a stingless bee funnel, not the best screen grab, I'll have to look and see where I put the rest of the shots for this sequence, to give some idea of just how small a bee they are.

Nikon 80-200mm + Cannon 500D dipoter, portable camera light. Build 14, 4K 16x9, 24fps, f4.
stingless.jpg


Oh and some termites, same setup
termites.jpg
 
...I'll have to look and see where I put the rest of the shots for this sequence, to give some idea of just how small a bee they are.

I think I have a good idea of the scale- I can see single grains of sand!
 
Solecize has his bees facts confused. i did shot the majority of it at 100fps. i did a little at 4k 16:9 but it started getting buggy ;) and everything looks better at 100fps.
The bees are quite calm but I did not stick my hand in the bees and I'm not the one who's going to be attempting a bee beard. But a friend of the Dead Workers is and her family are bee keepers in Greenbriar, AL. We are working on a documentary about the life of bees and bee keepers.
 
Thanks for clarifying- I changed the first post to reflect 100fps.
 
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