these have been having a rough time for
the last 1012 years and so National
Geographic asked me can you do a story
about honeybees this is one of the most
well studied organisms well photographed
organisms like how am I supposed to drop
in out of nowhere and and try to do
something that hasn’t been done before
it’s kind of an ambitious thing to
promise National Geographic but it’s
also hard to say no to them
so I was looking for this fresh approach
to photographing bees and I decided the
best way to do that was to learn as much
as I could from beekeepers themselves
[Music]
eventually I brought bees back to my
home in Berkeley I watched them in my
backyard every day we tend to dismiss
things that are small if you can enter a
world at their scale can that change
your relationship to bees how do I do
that with a camera here I have a glass
window into this hi that’s something
that very few people get to see okay
maybe I can use this special access I
have to show bees in a new way so I was
just trying stuff different lighting
approaches noir s the traffic knowledge
after news animation fiber optic
lighting and it didn’t work I noticed
this bee was coming out of this brood
cell and his head was poking out and it
gotten stuck there I thought oh that’s
maybe that’s my opportunity to show a
bee face up close and personal
it shows all the details so I cut this
chunk of comb around the bees face but
when I zoomed in on it so many hairs it
catches all these little bits of dirt
and dust and I remembered this this
trick that I learned from a scientist at
the USDA and she said take an eyelash
glue it to the end of any little
toothpick safety pin it’s stiff enough
you can kind of comb its hairs and get
the little bits of lint and dust and
dirt and you won’t hurt it and so I took
this little eyelash and I brushed the
bees hair I use this technique called
focus stacking where you can take
multiple images at high magnification
when you combine the parts of each one
that are in focus together into a single
image and you can make the whole thing
sharp you can make the whole thing in
focus you lose a sense of scale so all
of a sudden you’d say hey wait a minute
what am I looking at this doesn’t look
right there was kind of an aha moment in
the idea figuring out if the idea was
gonna work that was a little bit more
complicated how do you connect somebody
to a big vase or the what are the
elements in this frame
manipulate the contrast of the light of
the shape of the lighting is now eight
months into this story
my editor asked me to send an update he
said hey look you know we’re a little
bit concerned about the progress of the
story and we’d like to see a new
direction by next week and all of a
sudden I had this ultimatum the night
before I was supposed to send these
photos that’s when this started coming
together I found that if I put the light
behind the honeycomb it would take on
the color of the wax that the bees use
this story to me is not like light and
fuzzy and cute it’s complicated its
mysterious its dark when I saw this dark
red glow it made sense but these world
is burning there is something going
wrong here there’s something dramatic
what next I think I said to him 7
o’clock in the morning on I like to
sleep I’ve been up for days at that
point
[Music]
[Music]
you
the last 1012 years and so National
Geographic asked me can you do a story
about honeybees this is one of the most
well studied organisms well photographed
organisms like how am I supposed to drop
in out of nowhere and and try to do
something that hasn’t been done before
it’s kind of an ambitious thing to
promise National Geographic but it’s
also hard to say no to them
so I was looking for this fresh approach
to photographing bees and I decided the
best way to do that was to learn as much
as I could from beekeepers themselves
[Music]
eventually I brought bees back to my
home in Berkeley I watched them in my
backyard every day we tend to dismiss
things that are small if you can enter a
world at their scale can that change
your relationship to bees how do I do
that with a camera here I have a glass
window into this hi that’s something
that very few people get to see okay
maybe I can use this special access I
have to show bees in a new way so I was
just trying stuff different lighting
approaches noir s the traffic knowledge
after news animation fiber optic
lighting and it didn’t work I noticed
this bee was coming out of this brood
cell and his head was poking out and it
gotten stuck there I thought oh that’s
maybe that’s my opportunity to show a
bee face up close and personal
it shows all the details so I cut this
chunk of comb around the bees face but
when I zoomed in on it so many hairs it
catches all these little bits of dirt
and dust and I remembered this this
trick that I learned from a scientist at
the USDA and she said take an eyelash
glue it to the end of any little
toothpick safety pin it’s stiff enough
you can kind of comb its hairs and get
the little bits of lint and dust and
dirt and you won’t hurt it and so I took
this little eyelash and I brushed the
bees hair I use this technique called
focus stacking where you can take
multiple images at high magnification
when you combine the parts of each one
that are in focus together into a single
image and you can make the whole thing
sharp you can make the whole thing in
focus you lose a sense of scale so all
of a sudden you’d say hey wait a minute
what am I looking at this doesn’t look
right there was kind of an aha moment in
the idea figuring out if the idea was
gonna work that was a little bit more
complicated how do you connect somebody
to a big vase or the what are the
elements in this frame
manipulate the contrast of the light of
the shape of the lighting is now eight
months into this story
my editor asked me to send an update he
said hey look you know we’re a little
bit concerned about the progress of the
story and we’d like to see a new
direction by next week and all of a
sudden I had this ultimatum the night
before I was supposed to send these
photos that’s when this started coming
together I found that if I put the light
behind the honeycomb it would take on
the color of the wax that the bees use
this story to me is not like light and
fuzzy and cute it’s complicated its
mysterious its dark when I saw this dark
red glow it made sense but these world
is burning there is something going
wrong here there’s something dramatic
what next I think I said to him 7
o’clock in the morning on I like to
sleep I’ve been up for days at that
point
[Music]
[Music]
you
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