I took a couple of days off from blogging. I spent so much time last week on the computer that my eyes were burning. I poured a lot of energy into my Flickr and 500px accounts. When someone comments on or faves one of my photos, I usually reciprocate. My images are getting popular on both sites, so it’s becoming a challenge to keep up.

I’m going to start spending more time on developing this website. I’ve been meaning to write some articles, and of course, more images. The latter will be done shortly. There’s plenty of good stuff that should be up here that’s been uploaded to Flickr and 500px.

I went out for a walk last night around the lake near my home. I’ve gotten some good macro shots there. But that wasn’t the best time for macro. Most of the flowers are wilting, whether from South Florida’s excess heat or the heavy rains we’ve had, and it was breezy to boot. That always makes getting good sharp shots very difficult.

The Canon 100mm f2.8 macro will shoot more than just insects and flowers.It can be used as a medium telephoto without any trouble. The image you see above is a baby Mallard duck I encountered during my walk. He was right next to his mother who was partially in the frame before I cropped her out. I have to be honest and say I wasn’t as close as this looks, I cropped the picture pretty heavily to get this image.

They were resting together on the bank near the lake when I walked up. Mother Mallard watched closely over her young as I snapped a couple shots. She then turned towards the water, and with her young, began to swim away. It was as if she were saying “that’s enough of the photo shoot, it’s time to go”.

But the baby duck, even in the water, seemed interested in me and my camera, and started to turn  back towards me. His mother quacked at him and he went with her.

I liked the way these came out and I also got some other bird images while I was on this walk. I’ll be sharing some of those soon along with my beloved butterflies, bugs, and flowers.

The Mexican Sunflower is one of my favorite flowers. The bright orange petals and yellow center are very attractive to me. There are many of these flowers at Butterfly World, as the butterflies love to suck their nectar.

I have tried several times to get a good capture of any of the butterflies on one of these flowers, without success, until recently. I always seemed to cut the wings off or get a bad angle or poor focus, but this one seemed to work. But I didn’t know what to do with the shot.

The background was not the best that I’ve seen. I often get a creamy background blur but this one was sort of half blurred with an unappealing sort of green. I tried using a texture and/ or tint, but it just didn’t look right.

Then I got the idea of using Topaz Simplify to make the wings look more like stained glass and the background would hopefully be a more pleasing blur. I actually used the Simplify preset in Topaz Adjust, but the Topaz Simplify plug-in has more to offer you if you do this sort of work.

I applied the preset to the entire image on a duplicate layer in Photoshop, and then reduced the opacity to around 75%. I used a soft brush on a layer mask to paint out the effect on the thorax and head of the butterfly. The result above is a bright, attractive creature with a nicely blurred background. I’m going be doing more of this in the future.

I was going through my archives the other day when I came across these two images. I shot a LOT this last spring because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to shoot that much this summer. Summers in South Florida are not usually pleasant for photography. It rains almost everyday and the humidity, along with my allergies, can make being outdoors difficult to handle.

Fortunately the ragweed hasn’t been in the air like it was last summer. I’ve been going to Butterfly World a lot lately. There’s no mosquitoes and I can get a ton of shots in an hour or two. I love the Fern Forest and some of the other parks, but I’m going to have to hold off a bit before I go there again.

These skipper butterflies were captured at the Fern Forest Nature Center in Coconut Creek, ‘Florida, about ten minutes from my home. It’s a great place to shoot with over 240 acres of wetlands (that means mosquitoes when it rains) loaded with a wide variety of insects and plant life.

The skipper is a very small butterfly. It strongly resembles a moth. As a matter of fact, the first time I saw one, that’s what I thought it was. It’s kind of furry and stout. It doesn’t look graceful like a lot of butterflies I’ve seen.

The way to tell a butterfly from a moth is this: butterflies rest with their wings up, moths rest with their wings down. The skipper is the size of  many moths, but it does rest with wings up. So a butterfly it is!

I’ve found these difficult to properly capture. When I take a picture of an insect, I want at least one eye to be in focus. With these creatures I often don’t get the focus right, the wrong part of it is sharp.

A lot of times that because I have a hard time getting the right angle.  They do not sit on the taller flowers or leave on trees, they’re closer to the ground. The skippers tend to move around a lot on their flower or leaf. They’re not easy to get close to either. They tend to be very skittish.

But persistence and practice does eventually pay off. What you see here is a couple of images that came out OK. When the mosquitoes die down at the parks I’ll be pursuing these creature again.

I missed posting here for a couple of days. We’ve had some out of town visitors, and I hadn’t even gotten out to shoot since last week because of the rains we have had down here this past week.

But the not shooting part doesn’t stop me from posting. I always have plenty of stuff to go through in my archives. And I wanted to take a very short break anyways to reorganize my thoughts and direction for this blog.

I’ve been working a lot with textures and tint overlays lately, and have been reading a book on processing by Denise Ippolito. She does a lot of workshops with Arthur Morris, a Canon Explorer of Light, and she’s written some really good books on macro photography. I just finished her one on flowers and will probably get another e-book from her real soon. Her philosophy of how she captures her subjects jives strongly with mine, and I’m going to be sharing more about that on this blog in the near future.

I went to Butterfly World this morning. It wasn’t too hot yet and it had just finished raining, which always leaves some nice water drops on the flowers for me to shoot. (you’ll be seeing some of those shots soon).  This place is a wonderful botanical garden as well as a butterfly sanctuary.

As soon as I walled in I spotted this Blue Mopho parked on a metal rail. I was going to pass him by. I’ve taken and posted shots of this butterfly before. But I felt strongly drawn to shoot him again. 

Following my intuition, I began to shoot. I moved around a bit to try to get as much of him as possible in the frame and get a pleasing background at the same time. The one you see above is the best of the series.

I was able to get him from a good angle with some very colorful flowers behind him. This is one of the things that I look for when I shoot. I try to get the subject with something colorful behind it that will blur nicely.

I’m pleased with the result and glad that I made the image. Since he was pretty docile I decided to get a close up of his wings. They have a unique texture and color pattern

One of the things I love to photograph is butterflies sucking nectar. Whether it’s from bananas, which many of the rainforest butterflies use as a nectar source, or from flowers like the candy cane in the image above, it’s been a fascinating source of imagery for me.

I like to get in as close as I can and get the proboscis covered in nectar. This particular shot of this Piano Key butterfly came out very well. The detail is sharp throughout, but the main thing is the light.

Backlighting on translucent butterfly wings or flower petals can make for a glowing image. In this case the wings and the flower were greatly enhanced with this lighting. This is the kind of light I love to encounter when I’m out on a shoot. I have to be careful that it doesn’t blow things out, but when it works, it’s wonderful.