Tiny Dancer

[Joe Senzatimore]

Photographed today at a new and beautiful butterfly exhibit at Atlantis Marine World in Riverhead LI. Many great looking butterflies in a very natural exhibit. Well worth the trip , and will go again. If anyone can help with ID it would be appreciated.

800 ISO f22 at 1/320th
Nikon Macro Flash

[John Storjohann]

Joe, this is a nice image of a butterfly I wish I could help you identify...:e3...I like the composition, you have good sharpness and detail across the eye and wings...if it were mine, I'd consider evicting the brown tones in the URC...and either evicting or toning down the BG leaf in the LHC. Looking forward to seeing more of your images from the conservatory!

[Dave Leroy]

Nice clean shot of the butterfly. I like the angle at just slightly in front of butterfly. Not sure where the two little streks up from antenna come from but I would clone them out. I have not used flash a lot but this looks well done. It looks like perhaps it was off to your right and has brought out nice detail in the darker parts of the butterfly.

Well done on a very sharp photo. I had a look at a photo gallery and could not find a similar looking butterfly so cannot help with ID either.

Dave

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Joe. This looks like one of the Heliconiinae butterflies (a subfamily of the brush-footed butterflies - Family Nymphalidae) - most are tropical and there are lots of species. Sometimes exhibits like this will have a list of the species present which would help you narrow it down. You captured a very nice pose with good sharpness. I think a few tweaks would make your image even stronger - John and Dave have already given you some good suggestions. In addition, you might try to tone down the whites in the wings as they look very close to being blown. I would also suggest backing off a little on the saturation of the greens. Use of flash will emphasize any tiny bits of debris on the leaves - you might consider cloning some of those. :S3: Overall, this is nicely done and a few tweaks will take it up several notches.

[Julie Kenward]

I agree with Steve on the ID - I thought it looked like a Julia Heliconian but would need to pull out the book and study it a bit more to be sure.

I'd also clone out the white spots on the leaves and maybe add a tiny bit more light near the face to separate that beautiful eye from the BG a bit more.