A Few Butterflies

Today’s is a very simple post. Just some shots taken at Butterfly Wonderland in the course of a recent visit by my daughter Jaime’s family, including Andrew and two young grandsons.

These shots were all taken hand held using a macro lens, set to allow me to get in very close to these intriguing creatures. Here is a slideshow showing some of the many I photographed.

You will observe that large areas of the images are blurred. This is characteristic of macro photography. Typically a macro photograph will have a very shallow depth of field, defined as the distance between the nearest and the furthest objects in an image judged to be in satisfactory focus. Depth of field is influenced by several factors, most importantly the camera to subject distance (focus distance), the focal length of the lens and the aperture size.

Managing depth of field with a macro lens can be challenging. By the nature of this genre of photography, the camera is positioned very close to the subject and generally the focal length of the lens is long (in the case of my lens, 100mm) to provide magnification. That leaves the aperture size as the principal, controllable variable. The larger the aperture, the smaller the depth of field. So by reducing the aperture size, one can broaden the depth of field.

Recently, I did a post on cactus flowers, Springtime in Arizona…https://www.shotsbypeter.com/blog/?p=10683. Photographing stationary flowers allowed me to use a tripod and a very small aperture, f/32. The small aperture expands the depth of field but requires a much longer shutter opening to gather the light required for correct exposure. A tripod is essential to stabilize the camera for the longer shutter opening in order to achieve sharp focus. If you look at these images, you’ll note that a much greater extent of the image is in focus, most importantly the entire flower.

Butterflies won’t hold still long enough to capture a long exposure. Furthermore, the light can be pretty dim in the crannies where they lurk. It becomes necessary to use a much larger aperture ( f/2.8 to f/4.5 for example) to get the speed required for a sharp, hand held image of a butterfly that can fly away at any time. Knowing that the depth of field would be shallow, I chose to focus on those areas of the image of greatest interest, the head and upper body of the butterfly. The wings and the surrounding flora are not sharply focused but they’re easily identified. Their colours contribute to the image and the contrast in focus helps draw attention to the subject of the photo.

I think a successful photograph is one that has a clearly chosen subject, that subject is faithfully captured and the balance of the image is complementary to the subject. It’s achievable in photographs such as these despite the limited focus.