18h ago

Macro shot of a European Hornet (Vespa crabro)

Found a colony of these european hornets living inside of a stone wall in Spain. I held my camera by the entrance and took shots as soon as I saw one come out. Ended up with maybe about ~50 blurry images and this nice one.

The photo was cropped and post-processed using Rawtherapee. I increased the local contrast and added some tone mapping and vignetting to make the hornet pop more against the background.

The original JPEG output by the camera is this:

3 comments

A European hornet killed my parents.
Nicely done! Were the 50 blurry shots you trying not to get stung? :)
- Trying not to get stung + arms getting tired + unable to look through the viewfinder or camera screen, because the nest was above my height and I had to keep my hands up to aim the camera at the nest. One of these would walk out every few seconds, stand in a random position near the hole, and fly away quickly.