Zebra Longwing - Heliconius charitonius

[Ian Cassell]

Canon 7D
Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro
Canon 430 EX + Diffuser
1/640sec f/7.1 ISO 400

Levels and sharpening in CS5

[Norm Dulak]

A sharp, well captured and attractive butterfly. I like both the insect and the background.

If there is room for improvement, it for me would be in the flower and in the red spots on the butterfly, which show some yellow and red clipping in the histogram.

If this image were mine, I would try to reduce the saturation of the red and yellow parts. I would also select the flower, which seems soft, and try to increase detail and sharpness there.

Finally, I would crop out some of the negative space on the left.
But overall, I like it. TFS. :cheers:

[Anita Bower]

I'm not a butterfly photographer, so my input will be limited. I like the composition, the position of the butterfly, the beautiful colors.

I would tone down the yellow, clone some of the dark areas in the background and crop some.

Thanks for sharing.

[Ken Childs]

Hi Ian, it's a beautiful butterfly with some great colors and a beautiful pattern. I've always wanted to find one of these things!

The comp looks good although I'd like to see what it looks like with a small CCW rotation and a small slice cropped from the left. This looks generally overexposed so if you have the raw file, I'd try lowering the exposure.....if not, you should be able to get good results with SH in CS5. This would look better without the petal in front of the abdomen but that's not a deal breaker. If you're good at such things, I'd also give a shot a blurring and evening out the BG and sharpening the antennae. A few tweaks and this one should shine! :S3:

[Ian Cassell]

Thank you all for comments and suggestions. I'm not really good at those things, Ken, so it's a good excuse for me to go back and practice with them!

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Ian. The butterfly is nicely positioned and sharp so you have some good material to work with. Some tweaks to the exposure and background, as suggested above, will make the image even stronger. You might try painting green at low opacity over the darkest areas to blend them into the background a little more. :S3: