 Photographing butterflies is
always a challenge because they seem to be very capricious in their
movement. You'd think that once the found one good blossom with nectar,
they'd settle in for a nice long drink, but that's rarely the case.
Usually they flit from blossom to blossom and often even plant to plant
in one feeding session. It can be really frustrating to try and get just
one good close-up shot.
There are, however, some
things you can do to improve your odds. The first, of course, is to
plant a butterfly-friendly
garden with plants like tithonia (shown here), butterfly weed, bee
balm, etc. Once you've got them in your garden though, try these tips to
get more good close-ups:
- Shoot early in the
morning. All insects feed heavily early in the day, so there will be
more of them to shoot. Also, their metabolism is slower when it's cool
out or when the air is heavy with morning dew, so they'll be moving
slower. The hotter the day is the more buoyant they become.
- Don't chase--wait. Set up your tripod near a nice blossom with a
plain background and wait. You'll have a far better chance of getting a
good shot if you sit-and-wait rather than chase. If you move around your
motion will scare them off more than anything, but if you stay in one
place, they will get used to your presence and they'll often land inches
from your lens and ignore you.
- Use a longer focal-length macro or macro zoom. I shot this photo
with 105mm Micro Nikkor lensn and had about 18-inches between the lens
and the butterfly. I've shot with a 55mm Micro Nikkor, as well, but I
was less than 10-inches away and it was much harder to get them to sit
still. Also, with a long lens you're less likely to block the sunlight.
- Use flash if you need to stop their motion. I actually don't mind a
bit of motion in a butterfly photo because that's what butterflies
do--they flutter. But I also like nice crisp shots and if the light is a
bit low you can either rasie the ISO or flip on the built-in flash. If
your camera allows you to compensate or adjust flash power, try using
minus-one-stop of compensation (on the flash output, not the camera's
exposure) and you'll get a nice natural balance of flash to daylight.
Read your camera or flash manual.
- Work on calm days. Easy to say, I know, but if you can work or calm
days the butterflies will be more still and also less likely to drift
around on the breeze.
- Put a flower in a vase. OK, yes, this is manipulating nature a bit,
but so what? Clip an attractive blossom and place it in a water bottle
on your picnic table and you can lure the butterflies to your set. It
works, I've done it many times.
- Be patient. Don't give up too soon. Many times just when I've packed
up the tripod because the butterflies weren't landing anywhere near the
plant that was in the best light, they suddenly get interested. They're
not mocking you, they're just being themselves. Be patient, wait, you
can get some good flower close-ups while you wait.
- Read about butterflies. There is a lot about them on the web and
there are some nice field guides at your library--the more you know, the
more shots you'll get.
Butterfly photos look terrific on homemade greeting cards and
they will absolutely draw attention to your Flickr Photostream (don't
forget to tag them with the kind of butterfly), so it's worth spending a
few hours a week trying to get a great shot. By the way, yes, I blurred
the background of this shot in Photoshop with the Gaussian blur tool.
Simple to do: I just used the magic wand selection tool to isolate the
background (and then reversed the selection to protect the butterfly and
flower) and then applied a Gaussian blur to the unprotected areas. It
takes some practice to get good at selections, but like any other skill
the more you do it the better you'll get.
By the way, did you know you can raise your own butterflies? Kits are inexpensive and they really work! You can even raise the beautiful monarch butterflies shown in the photos on this page. Just click the Amazon ad at right for more information!
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