I spent most of this Fourth of July relaxing and processing images. I took my wife out this afternoon and got something to eat. After the food digested I decided it would be a good idea to go to the gym and work off some calories. And on the way home  I would stop at a nearby park.

Cypress park was where I took the last Gulf Fritillary image that I posted recently to this blog. It’s a small park, but has plenty of dragonflies and several species of butterflies, including White Peacocks and Zebras along with the colorful Gulf Frittilary.

When I got there I went to the small wooded glen where I’d gotten my previous butterfly photos. Not much was happening there. A couple dragonflies,but they weren’t particularly cooperative. They just wanted to tease their photographer and not sit for their portrait.

So after about twenty minutes of more or less no action, I decided to go to a long strip of land that runs along side the canal bordering the park. Plenty of sticks for dragonflies to land on, and on the way there, there’s bushes with various flowers, including the butterfly’s favorite, candy corn plant. All kinds of butterflies love to suck its nectar.

As I walked by the bushes, I saw him. He was fluttering about, as wild butterflies love to do, but I sensed he was going to make some stops along the way. I followed him around the bushes until he settled down. The pink/red background you see is the cedar chips on the ground surrounding the bushes.

I finally got a shot like I wanted. I never could seem to get him with his wings open. And the background came out nice. I wound up throwing out a lot of shots, but the keepers are worth having. It’s just a matter of going out with the attitude that I’m going to capture something amazing, and persisting until I get something good. If you do that, you probably won’t come home empty handed.

I captured this image today at Butterfly World. I’ve made images of this butterfly before, but I found this to be a particularly attractive shot. I rarely see these hanging from a vine. They usually rest on  a leaf. And there were several possibilities for a beautiful background. I just needed to shift around a bit and take several shots to explore them. I picked the one with the prettiest colors and best composition to share with you.

I shot this with my Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens. I focused and exposed it manually to give me the most control over my composition and depth of field.

I visited Butterfly World today. When it’s really hot outside or looks like it might rain, this is the place I want to be. It’s an easy walk to the indoor airconditioning in their gift shop, and easy to duck out of the rain. Plus, I can shoot mostly in the shade if I wish.

I decided to use my manual focus over the auto focus mode on my t2i. I love the image quality I get with this camera, but the auto focus leaves something to be desired. It has nine focus points, but only the center point is really sensitive.

This means when I compose my shot and use auto focus, I usually have to have my subject in the center of the frame.  Now a lot of times that’s fine, there’s a lot of pixels in the center of the frame on a cropped sensor camera like my t2i. But that also means I have to crop in Lightroom or Photoshop  if I want the subject off to either side for a more interesting composition. Dead center tends to be deadly.

If I focus manually, I don’t have to crop afterwards. I can simply focus where I want regardless of whether the subject is centered or not, and the crucial part the eyes or face of the subject will be in proper focus. And that’s how things seemed to work today.

I also started using manual exposure after the first few shots today. I usually shoot in Aperture Priority. That means I pick how much of the picture is going to be in focus and the camera decides what the shutter speed is going to be. A lot times this works well, but I have found that I also can get better exposures setting everything myself.

So I set the shutter speed at a fairly quick 1/160 of a second and the aperture at f4.5 to f5.6. This give me a fair amount of the butterfly in focus, especially the eye closest to me and the front wing. The fast shutter speed helps safeguard against camera shake.

The shot you see above is the last shot of the day. I was literally at the door of the aviary when I turned and made this image. I couldn’t resist it, the butterfly was practically hugging the flower with its front legs.

Technically, its not the best butterfly shot I’ve taken. It’s not tack sharp at 100% zoom in Lightroom, I usually reject it and move on. But this pose was so compelling, and the image so beautiful, I set aside the technical aspect and embraced the picture as it was.

And that’s important. To know when to set aside technical considerations and follow my heart. I want to my images to be correct as possible, but it’s possible to go too far and reject an image that expresses a concept beautifully because it’s “not up to standards”. I’m learning new things all the time.

I was going through my archives tonight when I came across this image. I shoot almost everyday, so I wind up with a lot of stuff that  doesn’t get posted right away. I originally felt that this one had too much light on the right side of the image.

I wound up cropping it on the right, and giving it a little “pop” in Topaz Adjust 5. A lot of my images benefit from this treatment, as it gives a colors just a bit of a boost without over-saturating them, and tends to sharpen the image without overdoing it. It’s especially good to do after using some strong noise reduction (which this image didn’t need).

One of the things I liked about this image when I looked at it tonight was that it was in focus all the way to the butterfly’s head and eyes. This is tough to get when I shoot at an aperture wider than f4, as it tends to bring the closest part of the subject into focus and blur the rest. I shot this at f3.5, which tends to soften a lot of the image a bit.

I went to Fern Forest Park today. I hadn’t been there for about ten days because of the stormy weather and the mosquitoes it tends to bring to the park. Since it’s been dry for a couple days, I figured it wouldn’t be too bad of a place to shoot.

When I go out to do photography, my attitude is that I’m going to come home with amazing things. Those images may come in the beginning of a shoot, at the end, or, once in a while, the entire session is sensational. I generally wind up tossing out about half of the shots for motion blur or poor focus. The rest I can pick through and wind up with a handful of great images.

I got there about 10:30 this morning and it was already hot. Like most of the country, it’s been very warm in South Florida with temperatures in the 90′s. And when I go to this park I make a point of wearing jeans and a sturdy pair of shoes or boots. It gets muddy there plus I like to to go off the trail and into the thicket to get close shots.

There were hardly any mosquitoes on the Wetlands Wander, the wide walkway fringed by a canal on one side and the swamp on the other. There weren’t too many dragonflies, they were in the swamp chasing the mosquitoes. I decided to concentrate on staying in the shade as much as possible and go after wild butterfly shots and whatever bugs I might spot in the flowers.

But the butterflies kept flying off, and I couldn’t seem to hold my hands really still for the bug shots. I was a bit pressed for time and the heat was getting to me. It started looking like for the first time, my shoot was going to be a complete bust.

And when I got home and looked at the images on the computer, I was not too thrilled. Nothing seemed to be in tack sharp focus or was filled with motion blur. It didn’t help that there was a light breeze and the bugs I was shooting were not sitting still.

So I wound up throwing away 90-95 % of my shots, which is  a scary high percentage. When I review my images I zoom in at around 100% on the face and/or eyes of my subject. If it’s not very sharp, out it goes.  I keep my standards very high for my keepers nowadays. If it’s not really sharp, why keep it, unless I’m going to use it as an abstract, which I sometimes do for flowers.

But I did wind up with the Zebra butterfly at the top of this post. He’s tack sharp, even in the eyes, and I like the bokeh. I took a ton of shots of the blue wasp below on the flower. It was frustrating having many shots well framed but finding they were too soft to keep. I like this one, especially after I cropped it a bit.

The main thing for me is keeping a positive attitude and not settling for less than the best I can produce with my existing gear. In the end, it doesn’t matter how many shots I miss or throw out, it’s the final results that count. I just keep shooting learning.