Butterfly photography

Butterflies make wonderful photographic subjects, but as we all know, they are frustrating to capture. They often don’t nectar on a flower for more than a few seconds (if you’re lucky), their wings are in motion most of the time, they usually don’t allow a close approach and, because they are macro subjects, depth of field is shallow and it’s hard to render the entire insect sharply.

There are several key elements to consider for butterfly photography:

1. Where to find butterflies 2. How to photograph them

3. How to post-process butterfly pictures

Finding butterflies

The easiest way to find butterflies is to attract them to a garden. If you live in a place where you can make a garden, include plants that butterflies use for nectar and/or host plants where they lay their eggs. Butterflies (and moths) and their caterpillars are very specific in choosing food plants. For example, monarch butterflies only use various species of milkweed. The gulf fritillary (shown at right) feeds on passion vine. The black swallowtail uses dill, parsley, fennel, and carrot.

Some plants attract a variety of species, such as Lantana flowers.

location. Find out which species of butterflies are native to your area and then find out what these insects feed on. You can get this information online from multiple sources. Click HERE for one excellent resource. On this website, click on any of the plants listed and you’ll be taken to a page that identifies butterfly species that feed on these plants.

Another excellent resource for information about native food plant species is the Xerces Society (www.xerces.org) named after the Xerces blue butterfly that became extinct. It was last seen in the 1940’s in the San Francisco area.

Butterfly houses are a great source to find a tremendous variety of species. Butterfly houses usually have exotic, tropical species from Central and South America, Asia, and even Africa. Butterfly World near Miami, for example, is amazing. In Vienna,the Imperial Butterfly House is located in the 13th century Hofburg Royal Palace. The Bali Butterfly Park in Bali, Indonesia, is also sensational. One of the best butterfly houses to visit in the United Kingdom is the Stratford Butterfly Farm, Stratford upon Avon, in Warwickshire. Each of these facilities offers tremendous photographic potential. I captured the mating Malay lacewing butterflies on the top of page 9 and the yellow and black birdwing butterfly, below, in the Bali Butterfly Park.

In the wild, butterflies are found pretty much everywhere. You just have to be on the lookout for them. I’ve photographed these insects on my property in Tennesse and in Nepal, Patagonia, China, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, France, Costa Rica, and Brazil. The malachite butterfly on page 8 was nectaring on a flower in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I captured the eastern tiger swallowtail on the same page in my front yard.

You can also purchase live eggs, cocoons and chrysalids, and caterpillars online. Depending on the local laws, these can be shipped overnight. You can then raise the insects until they emerge from the pupa stage into adulthood. Photographing them under controlled condi-

tions when they are in perfect shape -- meaning their wings aren’t tattered and their colors are bright -- produces flawless images. Once you’ve finished taking pictures, if the butterflies or moths are native to your area, you can release them into the wild.

The Ceanothus silk moth, below, Native to North America, is a species I purchased from a supplier online. I photographed it in my family room on a broad leaf potted plant my wife was growing. I used a ring flash for evenly diffused lighting.

How to photograph butterflies

The first consideration is how to get close enough to butterflies to fill a significant part of the frame with the subject and not scare it away. There are two options: 1) Use a telephoto macro lens, or 2) use extension tubes placed between a fixed telephoto lens (or a telephoto zoom) and the camera body.

A telephoto macro lens is convenient and they

are great to use. The background goes out of focus quickly, and soft backgrounds are often ideal because they direct all the attention to the subject as in the photograph of the Sara longwing butterfly, below.

The disadvantage of the telephoto macro is it’s expensive, it’s heavy, and it takes up a lot of room in your photo backpack or camera case. On the previous page, you can see a size comparison of a 50mm macro lens and the 180mm Canon telephoto macro.

The alternative is to use one or more exension tubes shown at right. They can be used separately or in combination, and they transform any telephoto lens into a telephoto macro. A 70-200mm medium telephoto, for example, becomes a telephoto zoom macro when used with extension tubes.

How close can you focus? It depends on the focal length and how many tubes you are using. With enough extension, you can fill the frame with even the tiniest of butterflies.

A set of extension tubes (I use Kenko brand) are inexpensive (under $200), they are light (there is no glass at all -- they are essential-

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ly hollow spacers), and they take up very little room in a photo backpack. They are also very light, especially when compared to carrying a telephoto macro lens.

Post-processing butterfly photos

I find that many photographs of butterflies require intensification of color and contrast, but the biggest challenge, often, are backgrounds. Backgrounds can be very busy and distracting. If you use flash or if midday sunlight is too contrasty and the background becomes black, a soft green out of focus background makes the picture more attractive and more natural looking. I, therefore, keep a folder full of out of focus foliage images for this purpose.

Also, sometimes a wing tip is broken or other blemishes make a specimen less than perfect. Post-processing skills can address these issues.

The picture of the morpho butterfly, above, illustrates what I’m talking about. The left wingtip is broken off, and the background is black. Butterflies are diurnal -- meaning they fly by day -- and black backgrounds don’t look normal. In the version below, I replaced the blackness with soft, out of focus green foliage. Then, I selected the full wingtip on the right and used it to replace the imperfection on the left. §

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