Red Lacewing (Cethosia biblis)
Shot at the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory. Last shot of the visit with two kids hanging off my legs.
Shot at the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory. Last shot of the visit with two kids hanging off my legs.
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Jun, 2014Views
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Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken at the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory which is located close to my home in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. It is an excellent location to work on capturing butterfly images as it is in doors and its glass roof lets in a lot of natural light.Time
I remember the time well as my sons (3 and 5 at the time) where starting to get hungry for lunch (approaching noon). We were just about to leave when another person pointed out this beautiful specimen. The boys didn't want me to stop so they both grabbed onto my legs and were shaking me to go. I had to lean in to get the framing I wanted as you are not allowed to leave the marked pathways. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to get such a sharp shot with all the commotion going on around me.Lighting
I always try to use natural light at this location as it allows me to get nicely coloured backgrounds. While the light is good at the conservatory, I remember this day being slightly overcast. As I was hand holding I knew I needed to use a slightly faster shutter speed so I selected 1/160 or slightly more than 2x the focal length. I also didn't want to push the ISO to high on the K-5 so that meant I needed to open up the aperture, in this case f/4.Equipment
A Pentax k-5 with an old manual focus Tamron SP 90 macro lens was used. It was shot hand held in natural light.Inspiration
I would challenge anyone to try to not get frames at this location. Great light and beautiful butterflies makes it easy to get lost in your camera here.Editing
White/black point, a bit of clarity and vibrance, a touch of contrast/sharpening/sharpening and finally a minor color temp correction (to me this is minimal) . This image is uncroppedIn my camera bag
At the time this was taken I was only using the K-5 and 90mm macro. I have since switched systems to Canon.Feedback
It has been my experience that when starting out with macro the number of frames you shoot is the biggest factor in your success. I would also recommend that everyone starts with a manual focus lens. I find that it forces you to think about how you are shooting and also gets you working on moving the camera and yourself to achieve focus. I have found that the number of keepers you get working this way is much higher than with auto focus (I still primarily manually focus all of my canon macro lenses). With macro photography DOF is always on your mind as it is so limited. As such you see a lot of material about macro advising to always use your lenses smallest aperture. I have found however this isn't always the best approach. For example this image was shot at f/4 giving a very shallow DOF to work with but it works in this situation because the butterfly is very thin in the position it is in. The other benefit of having a more open aperture is you get a softer background. My advice is to not be afraid of using larger apertures in macro photography. My thought process when taking this images was as follows. Fill as much of the frame as possible with the butterfly but making sure none of it is touch an edge. Leave enough border around the subject so that it can "breath". Look in all of the corners to make sure they don't have unwanted stuff in them. I then noticed the leaf and the line it was creating so I tried to put it on the lower third. I wanted the entire wing and eye to be in focus so I worked hard to get the lens plane perfect (there were a few not great shots you aren't seeing). Once I had all of those things I just took frames moving the camera slightly each time to make sure I got it.
