I went to the Fern Forest Nature Center the other day here in Coconut Creek, Florida. This will probably be the last time I’ll get there now that summer has arrived. The heat I can stand, the mosquitoes I cannot.  They bit me up pretty good on this visit, and they only get worse as time goes on. I remember going there last June and they were biting me through the back of my shirt…

So I’ll spend more time at Butterfly World and other places until next October or November  rolls around. I have a lot of dragonfly shots from previous shooting expeditions to share with you. This one from the other day particularly stood out for the sharpness in the facial features as well as the composition.

I’m getting more adept at sharpening. I used Unsharp Mask and the Sharpen tool  in Photoshop CS6 to bring out the finer details in this image. The settings I like to use in Unsharp Mask are: Amount 65%,  Radius 4, Threshold 3. I used an inverted layer mask so I could paint the sharpness just on the dragonfly itself without sharpening my background.

I lost my insect ID book and can’t remember the name for this fellow. They are quite common here in South Florida, and swarm the Fern Forest Nature Center here in Coconut Creek. I used the new Topaz Clarity plug-in (I’m an affiliate Beta tester for them) as well as the Smart Sharpen tool in Photoshop CS6 to process these images. I have always been fascinated by their compound eyes….

I went to Fern Forest Nature Center today in hopes of capturing some dragonflies. The were not in abundance, as far as I could see. They must have been deeper in the wetlands feasting on mosquitoes. I encountered this one who nicely posed for me.

There was a great deal of glowing iridescence in the wings and around his eye. We were not in direct sunlight. The trail I was on was very deeply shaded. He was a most intriguing sight.

I was going through my archives the other night, looking for photos to get rid of. I have about 20,000 images in Lightroom, and I know there’s stuff I should just let go of….

Of course as I do this I come across shots that I need to do something with. I liked this one in particular because of the way the background blurred (bokeh). It was shot with my Canon t2i and 100mm f2.8 macro lens. I have since upgraded to a Canon 5D Mark II and the “L” version of the macro lens, and I still find some of the images from the t2i to be quite compelling.

This butterfly was captured at Butterfly World, here in Coconut Creek, Florida. It’s Australia’s largest butterfly, and is on the endangered species list. As you can see, it’s very colorful, with a very unique pattern on its wings, making it an attractive source of macro imagery.

I’ll be posting more images of this butterfly over the next few days, sort of a mini series. I hope you enjoy seeing these as much as I enjoyed making them.

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.