I went back into some pictures I took the first day I got my Canon 5D Mark II. I was so excited that day, I went straight from Best Buy to Butterfly World without a stop in between. That’s right, I unboxed, put in the memory card  in the store, and went shooting.

I got some great shots that afternoon. These butterflies are not easy to capture wings open. They usually rest with the wings in closed position. I processed this image in Lightroom 4.4 the other night . The new Clarity and Sharpening brushes work really well at bring out lots of detail without creating halos or artifacts.

I’m excited about my recent upgrade to Photoshop CS 6. It’s definitely faster than the CS5 version and has some neat features. One of my favorite is the Oil Paint filter.

I’d seen what some photographers were doing with this filter on their nature photos, and it was one of the deciding factors in making this upgrade. It looks great on birds, and as I’m discovering in my experiments, it works well on butterflies.

I usually like to create an inverted mask in Photoshop and paint just on specific parts of the image, like wings or feathers. This image was very pleasing to me with the filter applied to the entire picture. I finished it with Pro Contrast filter in Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4.

I captured this a  few weeks ago at Butterfly World, here in Coconut Creek, Florida. I never tire of creating images of the Tiger Longwing, as it is an attractive butterfly with lots of detail in the wings.

What I have been going for lately in my butterfly images is scenes with multiple butterflies in the frame. This is not so common in the wild, but quite common at Butterfly World, especially on cooler or overcast days. They tend to bunch up together and rest for longer periods of time.

The key to making a shot like this work is go get down to a low angle and shoot straight at them. With a macro lens, the depth of field is not so great, so I need to keep them parallel to me for the best effect. To the right of the Tiger Longwing is a Madeira butterfly with a partially obscured Piano Key butterfly to the left.

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 100mm f2.8L, f5.6, ISO 800, 1/1000 of a second. It was breezy yesterday. When I go out in those conditions, I like to set a high shutter speed and shoot anywhere from f2.8-5.6. I get nice bokeh and can freeze the motion of butterfly on the flower.

I know a lot of people don’t like to shoot wide open with a macro lens, they would rather stop down to at least f8.0 or even f22 or higher. Sometimes I like to get that great depth of field and get the whole picture sharp and in focus. I also love bokeh, the beautiful background blurring that can come from shooting at wider apertures. By making sure I kept the eye in focus, that shallow depth of field worked well for this image.

I went to Butterfly World yesterday. It’s been breezy and hot here in South Florida. The heat is part of being here, the breeze can make macro photography a real challenge. That’s why I left my macro lens in the bag and decided to carry my Canon 70-200mm f4L  instead.

I used the telephoto because it’s easier to get the shutter speed up to 1/640-1/1000 of  a second. This tends to overcome the effects of the wind by freezing motion. It doesn’t always work, but it usually helps.

The other helpful aspect of shooting with a telephoto is the ability to frame distant subjects tightly. These butterflies were out of range of my 100mm macro lens( about 5-6 feet away behind an iron railing. I had to rack the lens out to 200mm to make this image. I actually cropped some of the rock to the right to make a better composition without hurting the image quality. With the shorter lens I would have had to crop even more, which could degrade the image quality, depending on the amount of cropping.

I exposed at f4.0 with ISO 800, as it was a shady area and sun was going in and out behind clouds. The shutter speed was only 1/160 of a second, just enough for me to hand hold without getting motion blur. Since the butterflies were clinging to solid rock, I didn’t have to worry about the breeze. The zoom lens comes in handy in difficult situations.