Queen Butterfly - Danaus gilippus

[Ian Cassell]

Canon 7D
Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro
Canon 430 EX + Diffuser
1/640sec f/11 ISO 400

Curves and Sharpening in CS5

[bhavya joshi]

Good one Ian..
Colourfull wings.. BG also good.. Thanks for sharing..:S3:

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Ian. The butterfly is nicely posed and you have good sharpness. The whites on the butterfly and parts of the background look overexposed. If you shot this in RAW, you could try to tone those down with the Recovery slider. In the field, you could try lowering the power of your flash. The background, particularly on the left half of the image, is drawing my eye and is detracting from your otherwise strong photo. If you choose to do so, it would be fairly easy to remove those background plants and I think your image would be much improved. :S3:

[Ken Childs]

Hey Ian, Steve covered my thoughts pretty well already. The only thing I would add is that the BG has a fair amount of noise showing so run whatever NR reduction program/plugin you use.

[Anita Bower]

Beautiful butterfly. Love the colors, sharpness, position. Others have offered helpful suggestions about the bg to the left.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Ian,
Steve covered what I was going to say on the whites and BG. Tese are tough when it is sunny so try looking for a good BG first......then see if the BF come to that area. An interesting byproduct of going to f22 or higher is that BG's tend to go black fairly quickly.......so may have helped minimize some of that BG although the one hot spots seems that it would be problematic. Another option was to go W/O and get as parallel as you could to the monarch......just another option for you to explore.

[Ian Cassell]

Thank you all. Yes, those whites are blown :( -- gonna have to work on that! I was not happy with the busy BG and thanks for the tips.