As with many of my photos, this one came about thanks to a simple walk around the pond on a break at work. I had my trusty Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens with me, and unlike some other photos I have taken recently, I didn’t have anything specific in mind. This particular perambulation was more about just getting out for a bit and, if I could get a picture along the way, great. Nothing really caught my eye though, until I saw this bug near the edge of the sidewalk. I don’t know what this thing is. I mean, I kind of do–it looks like a fly, right? That’s what I thought too, and it’s how I would describe it were it not for one key characteristic: this sucker was huge. Probably an inch long, and that’s not including the wings. My son thought it was a horse fly, but I’d say more like moose fly or an elephant fly given she sheer size of the creature. I’ve seen plenty of horse flies but none quite this bit. Not even close. But whatever this is, I know one thing for sure: when I saw it, I knew I had to photograph it. Fortunately, I just happened to have my camera with me because, if the best camera is the one you have with you, then I prefer to be prepared.
Whatever this was, it was not inclined to move around much which gave me a bit of time to compose a shot. I lowered my camera to the sidewalk and fired off a couple of shots, and quickly realized that I had somewhat of a perspective problem. This fly (I’ll call it that just to make things simple) was lower than my camera could go, which gave a point of view that was a bit too high. It felt more like a simple snapshot than a considered composition, but thankfully there was a solution at hand: the grass at the edge of the concrete. I realized that if I kind of nestled my camera on the ground next to the sidewalk it would give me a much better photo than I could get otherwise. This whole exercise also brought to the fore a somewhat intractible problem with my trusty D750: Live View shooting is bad. Really bad. For moving subjects, anyway. For stills it’s great, but the contrast-detect autofocus means the slightest hint of movement when shooting macro results in a big ol’ Rejected flag. There was no way I could compose this picture with the optical viewfinder so the flip-out LCD screen would have to suffice, limitations and all.
Thankfully this fly obliged my objective and held somewhat still for a few seconds, which was just enough time to get this shot. I didn’t really know what aperture to use so I went with f/8 (which is kind of my go-to starting point for macro shots) and took a couple of clicks before the fly repositioned itself at an angle which precluded any photographic possibilities. Turns out f/8 was…not quite right. I should have taken this at f/11 or smaller, as the depth of field is just way too shallow and the somewhat sickly color cast in the middle would have been somewhat ameliorated with a smaller aperture and, as a result, the light being just a bit more under control. It’s fine though, since I do think the shot turned out OK and was fun to take which, as any Weekly Fifty reader knows by now, is all that really matters to me :)
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