Patience is not always one of my best personality traits. I’m pretty busy most of the time, and I like to get things done quickly and efficiently. I suspect that is true of most of us these days. But when it comes to taking good nature photographs patience truly is a virtue (and again, I have had to learn this the hard way!).

A prime example of this was when I discovered all the beautiful butterflies, bees, and other wild things that the passion fruit and blackjack flowers attracted. There were lots of them, and when I pulled out my camera it seemed hard to know even where to start. Sounds like a great situation to get loads of great shots, huh? But as I would start to shoot, my subject would frequently flit off to the next flower. I would follow, and as I would start to shoot again, off it would go again. Or another beautiful subject would flutter by, and off I’d go trying to capture that one instead. All my moving around disturbed them, and before long, all of them were gone. I’d had a bunch of photos, but most turned out to be out of focus, or the subject would be moving too much. In other words, they were worthless. It was very disappointing.

So the next time I decided to try to shoot the wild things in the flowers, I watched my subjects for a little bit. I picked one flower that seemed to be quite popular. Then I set up my camera, focused it on the flower, and waited. And surprise! Along came a butterfly. It started to feed, and I started to shoot. When it flitted off, I waited for the next one. I spent about forty minutes shooting photos, and got a lot more usable footage than I had in over an hour in the previous session. And I didn’t disturb my subjects at all, which is also important. It was a good lesson, well learned, even if it was the hard way!