The Balance of Life

During my last visit to the Mass Audubon Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary I came face to face with a green bottle fly. It was amazing how long the fly was sitting still on a coneflower and it turned out to be a macro photographer’s dream come true. The few intimate minutes allowed me to get a glimpse of its life and most important it allowed me to set up my tripod and explore different exposures, perspectives and compositions. At first the fly was facing sideways which allowed me to capture its full torso while Balancing Life between to coneflower petals (aperture f/11, exposure time 1/5 seconds). While carefully moving closer the green bottle fly hopped over onto a single flower petal and looked straight on into my camera. Aware of the potential unfolding in front of me I manually focused on its head and eyes. The large aperture setting (small f-stop) provided a faster shutter speed for higher quality, less blurry pictures, and also supported limited Depth of Field that solely glues the viewer to the head and eyes of the fly. The beautiful metallic colors of the fly combined with the fabulous colors of the blooming coneflower produced a beautiful balanced nature Macro Photography picture as found in the wild. Still at ISO200, lowering the aperture to f/5.6 resulted in a slightly faster shutter speed of 1/20 seconds. I purposely underexposed by 1/3 of a stop to boost and saturate colors. Dust spots removal, minimal contrast, lighting and color saturation adjustments were made during post processing before sharpening the final images of the flies.