Little Yellow Butterfly In Wild Asters

[Allen Sparks]

Canon 40D, Sigma 150mm macro, Tamron Pro 1.4 Teleconverter
ISO 400, f13, 1/800, hand held, natural light

This butterfly would not let me get very close so I gave up on my usual frame-filling shot and went for more of a compositional look. Any comments appreciated.

[Julie Brown]

Hi Allen. Nice color and detail in the wings. If this were mine I would crop a bit tighter to showcase the butterfly more with the flower.

[Jonathan Ashton]

You have the butterfly beautifully focussed, I can see why you included the flower heads but for me they are competing a little with the butterfly. I agree a crop would help but you would still have other (fewer) flower heads acting as a distraction.

[Peter Farrell]

Nice color and lighting and sharpness on the bf. I agree that the flowers compete too much with the bf and a tighter crop may help

[Julie Kenward]

Allen, I don't mind the flowers at all - it's all the other stuff (the willy nilly foliage and stems) that are distracting to me. I would think an aperture more in the 6.3 to 8 range would have captured the butterfly and flower heads and loosened up that BG a bit. You did get an excellent butterfly specimen here and lots of good, clean detail on him. I also really like that you have him coming in at an angle from the bottom of the frame with the flowers more to the right and above so your eye sees him and then sweeps around the frame.

Two suggestions for shooting into a field of flowers is to watch the angle you're shooting at. Getting down lower will give you more greenery in the BG and less dark pockets. Also, try to watch where the flowers are along the edge of the frame and either get them all in or all out. It leaves the image feeling "cleaner" if you can make that happen either in field or with a little clean up in pp.

[Mike Fuhr]

I like that all the flowers are included, and don't really mind the stems. I might try to remove the partial flower in the LL corner. You could also make this into a vertical with the bf in the lower third. Just a thought...

[Ken Childs]

Allen, I know how hard it is to get close to this species. They also like to stay close to the ground which makes it even more difficult to get a decent shot.

I have to agree that the 'fly is losing something because it has compete with the flowers in this shot. You might try a tighter crop or if there are more of these beautiful Asters available, zoom out and make the shot of a field of flowers that happens to have a 'fly in it.

[Stuart Frohm]

I like the original image but agree that eliminating some of the floral background might help. Here's a quick attempt at that. In addition, I'd consider eliminating the flower at lower right of this cropped version.
Very respectfully,
Stu

[Ken Childs]

http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p193/kjchilds/BPN/SmallLittleYellowinAsters-edit.jpg

I was thinking of something more like this crop. This is just a quick clone/crop/NR as a proof of concept. I probably wouldn't have done such a tight crop if I had more time right now to do more and better cloning.