Mariposa Copper

[Julie Brown]

I shot this butterfly in Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite NP, July 2006
This is an example of how I used to approach butterfly photography-to get the species ID first, composition 2nd

Canon 20D, Tamron 28-300mm XR Di f3.5-6.3, focal length 300mm, auto WB
1/250sec, f/16, ISO 200, 0 EV, pattern metering, pop-up flash, manual mode

2006 PP: LR 1.0 very tight crop, slight exposure adjustment

2010 PP: LR 2.6
re-cropped to give more bottom, top, and right BG
WB: daylight
exposure adjustment: set black and white points
enhanced clarity and vibrance
tone curve: brought down highlights, lights, darks
HSL: slight boost to yellow and blue hue and saturation
sharpening, NR
dust spot removal, cloned out distracting leaf to the right, smoothed out BG, selective sharpening of wings

the DOF at f/16 allowed for greater sharpness of the whole butterfly, but also a busier background (not sure how successful I was with the clone tool). I used to shoot jpeg, luckily this was in RAW

[Julie Kenward]

Julie, another beautiful butterfly. You are really making me itch for next August when our botanical garden has its butterfly festival! I like the dof here as the entire butterfly is well covered but the angle of him turning away (we call this HA in the avian forum) is not the best. Keeping the head towards you or at the least a complete side view is always the best way to go to get the viewer to connect with the animal/insect. Still, I like the details we see here - nice sharpness without being overly done and the BG isn't all that bad. I'd take a soft brush and smooth out some of the sharper lines with kind of a swirling motion and then I think it would be perfectly acceptable.

[Julie Brown]

Thanks Jules. I am learning so much from the all of the constructive criticism provided here. This is really going to make me work on my composition during capture. My equipment is more suited to this type of work anyway-since I don't have the 500mm IS.

I can't wait for butterfly season either! We have a butterfly house here in Indianapolis associated with White River Gardens. It is a good place to see tropical butterflies. They are spectacular-but I really prefer to find butterflies in the field.

As for the soft brush smoothing-would that be a good reason to take this image into PS Elements to work on the BG?

[Ken Childs]

I shot this butterfly in Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite NP, July 2006
This is an example of how I used to approach butterfly photography-to get the species ID first, composition 2nd
In my case, I call this the "Field Guide Syndrome". For the past few years I've been trying to document as many species in my home county for the Butterflies and Moths of North America site so my main concern was species identification. The shots were OK but nothing to write home about. Now that I've covered the majority of the species likely to be found here, I'm now trying to get more pleasing shots that will appeal to more people, not just us butterfly geeks. :)

I feel this could use a bit more contrast because it looks somewhat flat to me right now. In addition to what Jules suggested, I think the BG would benefit from some NR. If you don't have a good NR program, Neat Image and Noise Ninja both work great and I'm pretty sure both work with Elements..

[Julie Brown]

Thanks for the tip Ken. I will check out the NR programs you mentioned. I've also been wondering about Nik NR software to use with LR. Do you know anything about it? I will go back and work on this image and repost if I don't make a mess of it.

I know of the Butterflies and Moths of N.A. website from Paul Opler. I did a weeklong workshop with him and his wife Evie in July of 2008 at the Sierra Nevada field campus of SFSU. That was a great week!

So how do you go about contributing to this website? Are you a state or regional coordinator, or a volunteer?
Glad to know you are a fellow butterflier!

[Ken Childs]

Thanks for the tip Ken. I will check out the NR programs you mentioned. I've also been wondering about Nik NR software to use with LR. Do you know anything about it? I will go back and work on this image and repost if I don't make a mess of it.

I know of the Butterflies and Moths of N.A. website from Paul Opler. I did a weeklong workshop with him and his wife Evie in July of 2008 at the Sierra Nevada field campus of SFSU. That was a great week!

So how do you go about contributing to this website? Are you a state or regional coordinator, or a volunteer?
Glad to know you are a fellow butterflier!
I've never used Nik's NR software but I imagine it works well.

There are instructions for submitting on their web site, http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/getinvolved

Do a map search for the counties in your area to see what's already been recorded. I started submitting about 3 years ago and am now up to 77 species of butterflies for my home county. They also need help with moths.

[Allen Sparks]

Really like this shot. nice tones, detail, and contrasting background. Agree on the tilt as Julie mentioned.

[Julie Brown]

Thanks Allen. I took the image back into Elements and smoothed out the background. Hope this is better. Thanks to everyone for looking and commenting.

[Julie Brown]

sorry for 2 images it did not show up in the preview