On my recent trip to Butterfly World the other day I encountered this Mosaic butterfly. I’ve gotten pictures of this rainforest butterfly on previous photo sessions, but the results are rarely inspiring. They would either be far back from the walkway or sitting on a banana, sucking the nectar. These locations do not usually lend an attractive background for a good macro image.

So when I came across this one hanging upside down from a leaf close to the walkway, I was pleasantly surprised. I maneuvered myself into the best angle to catch the green background without any blown out areas. Because he was in fairly dark shade I wound up shooting at ISO 1600. The resulting graininess or noise is not a problem to overcome with good noise reduction software (in this case, Noiseware Professional), and brightening the colors and adding some additional sharpness with Topaz Adjust 5 and Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask filter rounded out the appearance of the image. I added some contrast in Lightroom to finish.