Looks pretty good to me...
Why shoot without the lens hood? I virtually always use the hood! It's become such a habit for me, I'd feel lazy and foolish not using it. It can only help an image, can never harm it in any way.
When I got a Canon 10-22mm a few months ago, I tried using it without the hood. For that particular lens, the hood is large... think of a small Frisbee... making it a pain to pack in my camera bag. It's also shallow, so how much help can it possibly be? Plus, the 10-22mm is one of the most flare resistant ultrawide lenses made by anyone. So I set up a quick test to see if I could just leave the hood at home... First, I set up a shot without the hood where flare (which often can be an issue with wide angle lenses) has just begun to appear...
Then I popped the hood on the lens and took another shot (same scene and angle, the clouds moved a little while I was adding the hood)....
As you can see, the hood is effective... even a wide, shallow hood that's a pain to have to carry around. So I bite the bullet and use the hood pretty much all the time, just as I do with all my other lenses.
I only use
filters when they serve a real purpose. And, a bit ironically I suppose, it's even more important to use a lens hood when using a filter, even tho it can be a bit of a pain when using a polarizer you have to turn to set. When using a filter, risk of flare is increased a lot, so the hood is needed even more.
Regarding your bee shot, which IMO turned out pretty darned well...
The most important EXIF data:
ISO 1600, 1/250 shutter, f4.5 aperture, no flash.
Also: Av with +2/3 stop E.C., Center Weighted metering, manually set White Balance.
You are already at ISO 1600 and can't really go higher without shooting RAW and doing some very careful post-processing work, probably with add'l software such as Noiseware. At 1600 ISO, I'm already starting to see a little loss of resolution and increased image granularity, but only in the larger versions on Flickr. Some noise reduction would help with the slight granularity, but there would also be some loss of fine detail along with it. Any NR would need to be handled very gently and probably best done after final image sizing (but before final sharpening).
f4.5 this close is going to give pretty shallow depth of field. It will only get shallower, if you add macro extension tubes and focus even closer.
You might have to add flash, to be able to use both a smaller aperture and a higher shutter, while not going too high with ISO.
And you will likely find your lens even sharper when stopped down a little (the 70-200/4 IS is pretty darned sharp wide open, though). Most lenses do better one or two stops down from wide open.
But you also have to watch the other extreme with the lens aperture... Use too small an aperture and you will see the effects of "diffraction", robbing fine detail from your images and making them look a little "soft" or "plasticky". The ideal aperture with an 18MP camera, and assuming an 8x10 print size, is f7.1... but I'll use f8 and even f11 without too much concern. Any diffraction effect at those is minor. (With a full frame camera's less crowded sensor, such as my 5DII which have half as many photo sites per square mm, the optimal is f10 and I'll use a bit smaller, f16).
1/250 shutter speed is marginal for a fast moving bee. Might be okay if you have a steady hand, the bee pauses on a flower like this, and there is no breeze moving the flower around. What I'd do in a case like this is set the camera to a high frame rate and take lots of shots, working hard to hold the camera steady.... Some of the images might show movement blur, but a few should be good.
It's a minor thing, but I notice the bee's "face" is mostly turned away from the camera. I'd have moved left just a little, to try to get more of its eye in the image.
It's less relevent here, but I'm not sure why you are using Center Weighted metering. I use Evaluative most of the time. It puts extra emphasis on the area right around the active AF point, which can be a little like spot metering the subject. If you like Center Weighted better, fine... but it's sort of an older style of metering, usually used for scenics. In some tough situations such as a strongly backlit subject, that's fairly close and filling much of the viewfinder, I find Evaluative Metering with the 63 zone iFCL metering system to be quite good. Better than Canon's older 35 zone metering, though both work fine in less "stenuous" situations.
+2/3 E.C. might be a wee bit more than necessary in many instances. I leave my cameras at +1/3 by default, then vary a little at times.
Manual White Balance.... Well I presume that means you set a Custom White balance using a neutral target. If so, that's good. If not, well you will get weird results a lot of the time. You'd be better leaving it set to Auto White Balance out in the sun or Cloudy if in the shade (but with Cloudy you still might need to "warm up" the image a bit later in post-processing).
Something to think about...
By shooting JPEGs, you are limited in how much "tweaking" you can do to an image after the fact. If you shot RAW instead, you could easily change the White Balance, would have more latitude to adjust exposure, and can choose your own sharpening settings after the fact, adjusted differently depending upon the final output size of the image. With RAW, if your first conversion doesn't work out, you can always go back and do it over again, changes you make are "non-destructive" and reversible. With JPEGs in-camera, if you don't make a copy and do all your work on the original file, then save it, any changes you make are set in stone and largely unreversible.
For example, you have the camera set to "Standard" scene profile. Shooting JPEGs in camera, you can't really change that later. With RAW you can more easily increase saturation, contrast, color balance, etc., etc.
It is possible to shoot RAW + JPEG... Yeah, that fills up your memory card faster, but you would have both types of files at your disposal later.
To shoot RAW only, you need a computer set up to support post-processing.... might need better than a "consumer grade" monitor, usually need to calibrate the monitor (there are hardware/software kits used to do that), and need to learn to use it all.
NOTE: Canon's file naming system tells you if an image is shot JPEG or RAW. Yours are "IMG_xxxx", indicating they were shot as JPEGs. If they were RAW, they would be named "_MG_xxxx". When you shoot RAW + JPEG, the two file names for any particular image correspond... there would be two files named IMG_1234 and _MG_1234, for example.
18MP camera such as the 60D gives you a lot of leeway to crop your images. For example, if you use only the center AF point to focus, your images will tend to all be centered... that can get sort of boring, some things just might look better off-center. Well you can crop it later.
Still, there's a limit to how much cropping you want to do. So it's always best, when you can, to select the AF point and work to "fill the viewfinder" with the subject as best you can.
By the way, shooting fast moving subjects, you might want to try an old sports photographer technique called
Back Button Focusing
. The ability to do this with Canon cameras is one of the reasons that Canon became so dominant in sports photography for about ten years. Other camera makers have had to offer similar (and Image Stabilization) to catch back up with Canon. BBF is a handy technique with any sort of moving subject. It's a little like having the best of both world's: control over focus like we had when everything was manual focus, but with the speed and precision that's only possible with modern auto focus. Some people don't like BBF, or only use it in certain situations. I learned to use it many years ago and it's the only method I use 95% or more of the time now. (The other method I use a bit is Live View.)
By default, Canon cameras are set up with AF and all other functions tied to a half-press of the shutter release button. However this causes problems in some situations. BBF separates focusing (and IS start and metering start, though these are just secondary considerations) from the shutter release button. So you control AF with your thumb and take shots with your fore-finger. It sounds a lot more complex than it is, once learned and practiced a little. But, particulary if shooting moving subjects, you might want to give it a try. I shoot upwards of 2000 images some days and rarely have more than 20 or 30 where I miss focus (and it's usually my fault, not the camera's).
