Brought Back from the Shadows - _TNY_6503
When flash photography is prohibited, sometimes butterflies choose to land in unfortunate places. Or, they don't land there because I have no flash, it's just that if I was allowed to use a flash, there would be no issue.
Here is an already dark butterfly known as the gold rim swallowtail (Battus polydamas), aka the taillless swallowtail. Out of all the butterflies I've seen at the Haga Ocean butterfly house, this is one of my favourites. The design with the white and red pattern along the edge of the hind wings and then just plain black (or dark brown?) combined with the orange tufts of hair in the black coat looks sensational in my opinion
It had chosen to land at the base of a small tree which was very effectively shadowing it so it was quite dark.
My usual solution to this problem is to use the tripod and a long shutter speed, but sin ce this one was on the ground, it does take quite a lot of extra time to set it up with removing the center column of the tripod and reposition everything. Instead I went prone on my stomach and tried to support the camera on the ground to get an ok shot.
To be honest, I am quite surprised how much detail I could find in the original, very dark RAW file - this came out really nice for such an underexposed shot.
Brought Back from the Shadows - _TNY_6503
When flash photography is prohibited, sometimes butterflies choose to land in unfortunate places. Or, they don't land there because I have no flash, it's just that if I was allowed to use a flash, there would be no issue.
Here is an already dark butterfly known as the gold rim swallowtail (Battus polydamas), aka the taillless swallowtail. Out of all the butterflies I've seen at the Haga Ocean butterfly house, this is one of my favourites. The design with the white and red pattern along the edge of the hind wings and then just plain black (or dark brown?) combined with the orange tufts of hair in the black coat looks sensational in my opinion
It had chosen to land at the base of a small tree which was very effectively shadowing it so it was quite dark.
My usual solution to this problem is to use the tripod and a long shutter speed, but sin ce this one was on the ground, it does take quite a lot of extra time to set it up with removing the center column of the tripod and reposition everything. Instead I went prone on my stomach and tried to support the camera on the ground to get an ok shot.
To be honest, I am quite surprised how much detail I could find in the original, very dark RAW file - this came out really nice for such an underexposed shot.