I like taking photos of flowering fruit trees that are full of bees, although it’s taken me a very long time to learn how to get a good photo of these tiny blossoms and the pollinators who visit them. It’s become an annual spring tradition for me to settle myself next to one blossom-covered tree that is surrounded by bees. I’ll stand there for more than an hour taking photos.

The blossoms are hard to capture in a good photo, because there are so many of them, and they’re very close together. Photos of cherry or apple blossoms can end up being too busy or full of visual noise. It works best to focus on one blossom or a bunch of blossoms, and to let the rest of the tree fade into the background.

Paying attention to the background is on the the most important bits of advice I have for photography. The thing you’ve chosen will look different depending on the background. The sky, other blossoms, the trunk of the tree – each will give your photo a different vibe.

Getting up close is one of my favorite photography techniques. It used to be a struggle to get my cameral to take the close-up photos I wanted, but my dad gave me a fabulous macro lens, so now taking these sorts of photos is really fun.

This lens has made it so much easier to capture good photos of bees. I love taking photos of bees! I like the challenge. They’re unpredictable. They’re small. They fly quickly, only stopping briefly to collect a bit of pollen before moving on to the next blossom. They’re busy, as the saying goes.

It takes a lot of patience, but I almost always get one really good closeup bee photo eventually. A photo like this one makes all the time spent standing next to the same tree worth it. That’s why I do this every spring.