What color is a butterfly?

ginger_55

Mine aren't as good as Pathfinder's: my butterflys. I have never shot one before. Earlier I went to work them up and had an attack of panic: I didn't know what they were supposed to be colorwise, how much in focus, cropped?

And I was using my long lens, I don't have a macro, and I was not using flash.
So, any suggestions..................except right now I am not using flash for anything. But comments are welcome.

I am taking the exif link off, as I did it wrong, and I am going to bed, after 3 AM here.








The one below I call Tapestry. It just looks like a tapestry or a needle point to me. These were taken in a butterfly pavilion. The environment was screened in, the butterflys could not get out. Oh, I have no idea on the different kinds of butterflys.






ginger

david_h

Hi Ginger,

I really like the second one, for me you have gotten it just right.

With the first, using flash would have allowed you to expose the butterfly a bit better without blowing out the background. If I'd done it without flash, I would end up making two raw conversions, one for the bg and one for the butterfly then combining them.

pathfinder

Welcome to the land of butterflies, Ginger. : I think the lack of a macro lens will handicap you somewhat for close up shots of butterlfies, but there are two things that you could use with your 400 f5.6, which is a great piece of glass.

Extension tubes are inexpensive and allow much closer focusing - the 400mm focal length will help keep you farther away and frightening the butterflies. Canon also make a 77mm 500D lens that screws into the front filter thread and acts like a bifocal lens and allows much closer focusing also. And feel free to crop your images also. The pixel density of the 20D will certainly allow modest cropping. I have used both of these lens accessories on some of my shots, and frequently crop modestly.

The butterfly in the first image is a Spice Swallowtail and common in Indiana too. I might have cropped it a little tighter, and moved it more off center. Fill flash might even the exposure of the black wings and the lighter green of the leaves. Shadow/highlight my help some, or two seperate jpg conversions from RAW - one for highlights, and one for the butterfly.

The second shot has very lovely isolation of the butterfly against a nice clean simple background. Not always easy to accomplish a shot like this. I might have cropped the lighter area along the top - I prefer to not have highlight values along the frame edge as they tend to drag my eye off the image. But I like this shot a lot.

The third frame suffers from the screen in the background as you mentioned - these kinds of environments can be very challenging. Shoot closer in, with as large an aperature as possible. Long lenses help here because they have shallower DOF.

Again, welcome to the land of butterflies, Ginger.

Andy

wow - number two is super sharp, lovely color, well done.

ginger_55

david_h wrote:

Hi Ginger,

I really like the second one, for me you have gotten it just right.

With the first, using flash would have allowed you to expose the butterfly a bit better without blowing out the background. If I'd done it without flash, I would end up making two raw conversions, one for the bg and one for the butterfly then combining them.

Thank you, David. I am, have been, fascinated by insects like that, with their little legs and all. I had to take a lot of photos to get it right in one, glad that I did. I was hoping to do that.

Along with isolating the butterfly from the background. I knew that even at 5.6, I was not getting enough bokeh in the shots with a lot of folliage.

The bridge in CS2 was a help in finding the photo. I like being able to see the photos bigger, but even so, it was kind of painstaking to make sure of the focus.

On the first one, those butterflys looked quite dark to me when I took the photo. I may have worked it up too dark. I am not using flash right now, not even for fill, though I did see Ben use it very effectively on a bird that he posted. I have trouble with my camera in general, from the flash, I am going to have to send it to Canon, I think. My on camera flash is totally not working. For my baptism photos I am using the monopod to steady the camera and using the light source there. That has worked for me. I do like fill, though, and I will get to it sometime in the next year.

Since I got this new lens, I am just acquainting myself with it. I am using it kind of naked. I have an extender, there are people who would tell me how to tape the pins, or whatever, to use it. But I don't want to do that, yet. I am learning the lens, itself, the holding and the feel. Also, I just downloaded the trial version of CS2, so that is new.

I did not know how tight to crop the butterflys. So I went with less. I tried to get them a bit off center, but not crop them too tight, as I cropped my birds too tight and got a lot of advice re not cropping that tight.

Thanks so much for stopping and commenting.

ginger

ginger_55

Hi, Pathfinder, I was going to write the longer response to you, but I think I responded to most of your comments in the previous response I did.

What f stop do you use if you do not use fill? I wanted the bokeh, but I also wanted the whole butterfly. etc. I went up and down from 5.6 to 13, usually at 5.6 or 8.......??

Thank you so much for looking and sharing your knowledge with me. I will have to get a butterfly book. We are on the path for the butterfly migration. Already on a walk to see the birds I feel blessed with all the butterflys. But there will be
many more soon.

I just enjoyed sitting on the floor shooting butterflys on Thursday. Then I was kind of stuck at first re working any of them up. No "egret" style white points.

I do hope the birds are still around, too. I also took a few photos of butterflies downtown, just flitting around on their own. So I don't have to be at the pavillion. Shortly I could probably make a landscape of butterflys, smile.

ginger (Thanks for looking and helping me, PF)

ginger_55

Thanks, Andy!

ginger

Steve Cavigliano

Ginger,

These are some really small birds

Seriously, you did very good with these shots As Andy mentions, that 2nd one is outstanding It's sooooooo sharp. The others are very nice too. You might even try a bit of shadow/highlights on the first one. You can bring back lots of the b-flys shadowed body detail

I would be jumping up and down and posting to every site I frequent if I ever got any B-fly shots as nice as these

Forget the birds girl, you've found your calling....

Great work Ginger, I hope you are proud of these. I sure would be :


Steve

ginger_55

Steve Cavigliano wrote:

Ginger,

These are some really small birds

Seriously, you did very good with these shots As Andy mentions, that 2nd one is outstanding It's sooooooo sharp. The others are very nice too. You might even try a bit of shadow/highlights on the first one. You can bring back lots of the b-flys shadowed body detail

I would be jumping up and down and posting to every site I frequent if I ever got any B-fly shots as nice as these

Forget the birds girl, you've found your calling....

Great work Ginger, I hope you are proud of these. I sure would be :


Steve

Thanks, Steve, thanks very much!

The butterflys are nice, but they were just on the way to see the birds. Now when they really migrate, I will be going after them a bit for their ownselves.
Something different, I would like to do wide angle with them, possibly.

I could not stop w the birds. The birds have taken me to the most wonderful places, including this butterfly area.

And, especially, remembering my hurricane, watching this one, well, I feel blessed that I am living in this area, still, and I can experience these things. At my age I guess one gets that "things I want to see" feeling (there is even a book out with a title like that). And what I want to see, I have found is here. It is where the birds live, where my Cross Creek quote still sings, sorry gone for a bit, but it still sings (sorry for the sentimentality, but this area is just so wonderful...............and so fragile.)

Thanks so much for your wonderful comments, Steve. They are much appreciated!

ginger

snapapple

ginger_55 wrote:

Mine aren't as good as Pathfinder's: my butterflys. I have never shot one before. Earlier I went to work them up and had an attack of panic: I didn't know what they were supposed to be colorwise, how much in focus, cropped?

And I was using my long lens, I don't have a macro, and I was not using flash.
So, any suggestions..................except right now I am not using flash for anything. But comments are welcome.

I am taking the exif link off, as I did it wrong, and I am going to bed, after 3 AM here.






ginger

Wow! Ginger, this is so awesome.
I'm going to have to try butterflies with a long lense.

I'd like to see the exif on this.

Wonderful job girl, you did good.

John Mueller

So soon with the butterflies Ginger?
I thought you were going to wait a while:D
Lovely,sharp and colorful

bfjr

Very nice job Ginger, very nice