Punchy Colours - _TNY_2867

When you have a butterfly house as far north as Stockholm, Sweden (which is on the same latitude as southern Alaska), keeping flowers that can feed the butterflies is an impossible task with the amount of darkness the winter brings.

 

The Haga Ocean butterfly house therefore use synthetic flowers that are soaked with artificial nectar which the butterflies can feed on (along with fresh fruit like pineapple, orange and banana).

 

Here is a Julia longwing (Dryas iulia) which is refueling on one of the fake flowers.

 

I recently added a Sigma 2x EX APO DG teleconverter to the camera bag and using that one with the Sigma 180mm turns it into a 360 mm lens thouogh I lose AF (which isn't a problem for this kind of shooting). Also, it doesn't change the minimum focusing distance so it becomes a 2:1 lens instead of 1:1.

 

This turned out to be awesome for butterfly shooting, I suddenly have great reach and the image quality holds up beautifully - just zoom in on the fine hairs on the face of this butterfly.

Done