The fly was sitting in the sun on a slightly breezy day on some parsley flowers in the back garden.  The difficulties lay in getting close enough without falling in the pond or making the fly move on, and also to catch the fly facing the camera.

The image was taken using my macro lens on my 400D at ISO200 1/160secs at f/7.1.

Fly

My previous post pointed out that you don’t necessarily need expensive gear in order to take photos, much more important is being there with a camera, otherwise, no picture. Some of you may think this is a little hypocritical considering the number of pictures of insects I have taken this Summer with my much loved macro lens. But, without the macro function on my compact camera, I probably would not have bought the macro lens. It was really this function, and the fantastic pictures I get from my Ixus that got me into photography in the first place.
The picture shown here was also taken with my point and shoot (P&S). There are very few settings I can change, but I can put it on a macro setting. The light at this time of year is variable, and not always great at the time and place you want to take a photo. I had tried taking some pictures of the fly with my macro lens, but, although the sun was out I would have to open my lens to f/7.1 in order to get a decent shutter speed, especially as it was a little breezy. With a macro lens, f/7.1 gives very little depth of field. The resulting pictures were a little less than impressive.
Therefore, out came the Ixus and here is the result. As usual, ISO was set at 200, the camera then selected f/2.8 at 5.8mm, shutter speed 1/1250 secs. Yes, I could have reduced the ISO, but as I didn’t know the shutter speed was that fast then it didn’t occur at the time. (Note to self, adjust ISO setting on Ixus once initial satisfactory shot has been achieved.)
For a few more photos taken with my compact P&S camera, please see my set on Flickr.