Answer 04 of 12
How were the insects in these meadow photos photographed? – Curated Meadow Photos
What is and is not done to get a close pollinator frame, why it matters for your caption, and what to avoid claiming.
A significant part of this catalogue shows insects on flowers. How those frames were made affects what you can honestly say about them, so it is worth being direct.
What is normal practice
Most pollinator frames here are made by waiting: a long lens or a close-focusing macro, a slow approach, and a great deal of patience in the early morning when insects are cool and slow.
That is the whole technique. It produces fewer frames per hour than the alternatives and it produces frames that record real behaviour.
What we do not accept
Chilling insects in a fridge to slow them down, gluing or pinning them, and photographing dead specimens arranged on flowers are all long-standing practices in insect photography and none of them are acceptable here.
The reason is not only ethical. A chilled or dead insect sits wrong. The legs are not gripping, the antennae hang, the wings are folded in a way a working insect's are not. Anyone who watches bees will see it, and if your material is educational that error is doing damage.
Frames that show these signs are not published, and if one has slipped through, tell us with the asset id.
What this means for your caption
You may describe a pollinator frame here as showing the insect on that plant, because it was.
What you cannot safely claim from a photograph alone is that the insect is pollinating that plant, that it is a specialist on it, or that the interaction is typical. An insect resting on a flower head is not necessarily foraging, and many visitors take nectar without transferring pollen at all.
If your text makes an ecological claim, source it from the literature and use the photograph as illustration rather than evidence.
Identification of insects
Insect names are recorded far more sparingly than plant names, because insect identification from a photograph is much harder and frequently impossible below genus. Where a name is absent, that is a documented absence rather than an oversight.
Do not fill the gap in your caption. "A bumblebee" is honest; a species name you inferred from a picture very often is not.
Rare species and locations
Where a frame shows a species subject to disturbance or collection pressure, location detail is withheld even when it is known. That is a deliberate omission and we will not supply the location on request.