Red banded hairstreak butterfly

[LindaHarden]

Red Banded Hairstreak... walking along the plant stem toward a new group of flowers.
Model: NIKON D90
ISO: 250
Exposure: 1/320 sec
Aperture: 20.0
Focal Length: 150mm (Sigma)
Flash - SB700 with diffusion dome

Proceesed in NX2... mainly cropped, levels and curves and a little sharpening. Comments welcome

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From 2012 Butterflies

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[Dave Leroy]

Nicely done. I like the square on look with all the bits and pieces showing. Lovely bg as well. A bit cleaner perch would have been great but we don't often get a choice.
I wonder if a bit more sharpening on the butterfly is called for.

[Jonathan Ashton]

What a beautiful little butterfly we don't get these in UK. Nicely exposed and focused. If possible I would have tried to take the image from slightly more round to the left, I think this would have improved presentation very slightly.
A very minor criticism, there is a little artefact around the antennae due to sharpening and or noise reduction, I only mention it in case you untended to make a print.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Linda. What a colorful little butterfly - and in very good shape too! The diffused flash worked well, I like the slight diagonal of the stem, and you have a good background. With a flat subject like this you could likely have gotten the whole butterfly within your DOF using f/16 or even f/11 - your lens will be sharper at these settings than at f/20, due to diffraction, and would render more detail in your subject (not that this is bad, as presented, but it could be even better! ) Just something to keep in mind the next time out. This is very nicely done!

[Arthur Morris]

It would seem that the butterfly is angled slightly away from you and/or that there is a bit of motion blur as the face and the markings on the rear wing panel are sharper than the wings themselves. Are you on a tripod or hand holding? And how do you get a diffusion dome over a living butterfly?

[LindaHarden]

Arthur .. thank you. The butterfly was crawling slowly along the stem and I kept adjusting to try and achieve a good angle. I hoped it would stop a for a second but it never did. I was hand holding the camera as I haven't achieved a level of coordination of moving the camera on a tripod quickly enough before butterflies tend to fly off. I might have used the wrong term on diffusion... I was using the SB700 plastic attachment that covers the flash... Just a short history of my progress. I have been shooting with a DSLR since very late 2008 and for a couple of years used Nikon D50 for vacations, etc. In 2010 I tried some bird photography but I noticed a lot of butterflies in a patch of weeds in my yard and photographed a few. I moved up to a D90 and 85mm macro. In 2011, I really concentrated on trying to get the eye in focus and better exposure using flash. This year, I have been concentrating more on the background, getting the plane of focus correct and post processing (NX2). I really splurged this year and got the Sigma 150mm macro VR, the NIKON 300MM that is on my other camera and the SB700 flash. And I registered here a couple of months ago to get advice. Your observations are appreciated... I haven't quite learned to see the evidence in the final image that you can see in both this image and the long-tailed skipper you commented on.

[Arthur Morris]

YAW Linda. I would say that if you are doing macro hand held with natural light and not using flash as main light you need to learn to work on a tripod. Both of your images that I reviewed have serious sharpness issues :).