For some reason I don’t normally shoot butterflies. But the swallowtails are so abundant this year they’re getting hard to ignore. Here’s a tiger:
Papilio glaucus, the Tiger Swallowtail
photo details:
Canon EOS 7D camera
Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens
ISO 200 f/5.6, 1/320 sec
Gradient filter to darken the sky
Saturation and color balance tweaked in PS
Vignetting added in PS
A personal weblog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
Vignetting = blurring of the edges?
Vignetting = darkening of the edges.
beautiful
Thanks JP! It’s hard to go wrong with such a charismatic subject.
Not to be critical, but the butterfly seems paler than usual. Is it just me? Maybe the presence of a real sky is throwing me off.
The whole photo is paler than usual. I desaturated it.
I put this photo through some relatively heavy (for me) post-processing, as I felt the original was a bit flat.
Wow a lep on myrmecos! I had to double check what blog I was reading ha. Nice shot though, I miss seeing those eastern tigers.
Having tried to get pictures of butterflies myself, I can appreciate the problem. They make nice poses, but there is no warning when a good pose is coming up and it doesn’t last very long, so one has to be both very patient, and very quick.
Their larvae are even more impressive (for me) with their eyspots:
http://www.naba.org/chapters/nabambc/species-data/Papilio-glaucus-photo-9.jpg
Our swallowtail species (Papilio machaon) in Hungary has a very different larvae:
http://m.blog.hu/bo/bogaras/image/fecs1.jpg