It Was A Good Year For Butterflies

ThirdDayImaging

Hi guys - haven't posted here for a while, but there are certainly a lot of new uploads on my website. I really got into butterflies this Summer - never meant to. It is much more difficult than I thought! Auto-focus proved unreliable, but manual focus, though very challenging, rendered the sharpest results. After a lot of trial and error I settled on what has become my favorite lens - vintage (1960) Leica 90mm Summicron f2. It is super sharp with great tonal range. Shooting in RAW, I always have much less PP with this great old lens.

Anyway, thought I would share a few (6) of my most popular butterfly images from this year. They were all shot with the aforementioned lens at either f4 or f5.6. That gave me a pretty good balance between DOF and some (hopefully) non-distracting bokeh.

A "Common Buckeye" gathering nectar from Autumn Seed-um blossoms


A "Silver Crescent"


A "Glass-winged Jumper" on a Zinnia


A "Yellow Tiger Swallowtail" on a Butterfly Bush


A "Pipevine Swallowtail" on a Butterfly Bush


Gotta have a "Monarch" (on Red Milkweed)

Juano

Nice set of shots, well done! I do find the watermark very distracting, I wish it was smaller and not in the middle of the photograph.

ThirdDayImaging

Thank you.