Challenge

Some people relish a challenge, me not so much.  Nowadays I much prefer the ‘easy life’.  That said there has been an insect in the garden that threw down the gauntlet and challenged me to photograph it.  The creature in question is the Hummingbird Hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum).  These are summer migrants mostly from southern Europe.  Some years they appear here in good numbers, this is one of those years.  The difficulty in getting a good image is they are hyped up and seem to run on a mixture of full strength coffee and nitromethane!  Luckily the little devils love Red Valerian, a flower that we have plenty of in the garden.  So it was a case of bide my time and be patient.

Easy to see how the Hummingbird Hawk-moth gets it’s name. A plain background, in this instance paving slabs, helps the auto focus lock on. The settings for this shot were iso 320, 1/1500s @f8 using my macro lens. The image is slightly cropped to get decent dof

This background challenges the auto focus

An evening shot. Without the benefit of sun iso was 500, 1/1500s and f.stop only 4.8 = very shallow depth of field