Angles for butterfly photography

Army of bluebottles puddling

Photography of a full grown butterfly can be divided into two categories : Documentary and Artistic. In this post I will be discussing both of them in details with some interesting examples. Many photographers hesitate to move, bend and sometimes laying on the ground. Simply taking the photograph from the angle you first see it, does not makes a great photo. As a thumb-rule, for every purpose of butterfly photography and butterfly activity, there exist a typical angle to shoot. However this rule doesn't apply for artistic photography.

A. Butterfly Documentary Photography:
Purpose of this kind is help for identification, spot record and documentation.

1. Closed wing / Under wing (UN) shot:  In case of some species like lascar, sailor this shot is of utmost importance in identification process. A perfect UN photo is needed to see all the marking on the wing neatly. To accomplish, this one has to wait for butterfly to close its wings and settlement. During nectoring, butterfly seats on the flower. If the flower is not high enough, one needs to to bend. Otherwise one has to adjust the height accordingly.

After this, photographer should get in a place where camera is exactly perpendicular to the wings of the butterfly. Such angle covers the whole wing. It also helps to have lower aperture number, as depth of field required would be very shallow. Lower f-number will help to choose higher shutter speeds (improves sharpness of the photograph) and lower depth of field will impart nice bokeh to the image. Both features will enhance the beauty of the photo and additionally will make a perfect picture for documentation. This position of camera/photographer is much important when shooting mud-puddling butterflies.

One has to lay down flat on the ground to shoot in this angle. Often, photographers keeps standing and shoot mud puddling butterfly. This gives a slant and partial view of the same. If one cant lay down on ground, camera with veri-angle screen e.g. Canon 30X, Canon 60D etc is useful. Veri-anlge LCD will help to keep camera on ground and then tilting the LCD to view, focus and compose the image. Another case for a closed wing would be when  butterfly is resting on some small object with wings complete open. This can also provide under wing shot, small object hiding some part of the body.

Use of veri-angle or tilting LCD for mud-puddling butterfly

2. Open wing / upper wing (UP) shot: Apart from help in ID, Open wing shot often helps in differentiating male and female. There can be two occasions to get complete open wing shot of a butterfly: While basking or while mud-puddling. In the morning, butterfly often seats on a large leaf with wings flat open. This is in order to dry there wet wings because of dew. Most butterflies seats at suitable height for photographing, specially the small ones like plains cupid, line blues, lime blue etc. Some like Tawney rajah seats on a big leaf at some height, not reachable, making ti difficult to photograph. Again for a perfect open wing shot one should bring lens axis perpendicular to the plane of the wings spread. Advantages are same as stated in closed wing shot.

Perfect angle of tiny butterflies is sometimes intriguing

3. Miscellaneous shots: On very rare occasions, shot of the antenna is required. The angle to shoot whole of the antenna would be perpendicular to the plane of the antenna. This is critical shot, as one must shoot it at 1:1 macro. 

B. Butterfly Artistic Photography: 

Shot this beauty from the front while mud-puddling

        Although, every perfect and sharp shot taken with documentary kind of angle will be artistically appreciable I wish to mention some angles in this category. My personal favorite is the front angle. Eyes of butterfly is a striking feature when shot closely. A complex-eye structure is fabulous when seen in close-up. When shot from front side of the butterfly, during nectoring or mud-puddling, both eyes are captured. Mud-puddling is the best opportunity to have such shot. Added advantage in this case is the proboscis inserted in the ground. Another angle would be from behind of the butterfly. Almost every butterfly has dummy eyes like markings on its hind-wings. This is to create an illusion and in order to protect butterflies from predators like bird. These eyes and sometimes tails can be interesting to watch.

Eiffel tower like pose of apefly

Example of wallpaper angle

Another interesting  but difficult-to-achieve angle is : wallpaper angle. When butterfly opens its wings partially during nectoring or mud-puddling, one can photograph the pose at 45 degree angle. This covers almost every part of butterfly, although partially. It creates nice blur effect to out of depth of field parts.

A high angle would be interesting when shooting a butterfly with open wings and sitting at some height above photographers head. Eye can be focused perfectly, while making the rest of body blur by choosing lowest possible aperture. Photographing sailors with this angle would be a good net practice . Sailor like butterflies often seats in such position. 

High angle of common sailor

High angle of common sailor, another one

Image sharpening using High pass filter

With Photoshop, a photo can be sharpened in many ways. Some popular among them are : sharpen, smart sharpen and most popular unsharp mask. Here, I wish to demonstrate image sharpening technique I use : using a high pass filter. Its a few step process and creating action for this one is also fairly simple. Once created action, sharpening can be applied with just a click to any image in future. However, I wont be explaining here how to create actions, some other time.  :-) OK, so lets begin.

Step 1. Open the image. (layer name: background, by default)

Step 2. Duplicate the image. (layer name: Layer1, by default)

Step 3. Change the blend mode of Layer 1 to "Overlay". Blend modes can be found just above the layer panel.

Step 4. Now apply High pass filter to Layer1. Its can be found under the menu : Filter - Other -High pass.

Step 5. Set the radius value around 5. The key for correct sharpening is that one should see the edges in the thumbnail. press OK.

Step 6. Now, adjust the intensity of sharpening just by adjusting the Layer1 opacity.

Step 7. Cheers !

The images here are for demo. Changes may be  subtle to observe with images provided. Better, open them in separate window and compare them to see the effect. Ideally, advised to carry the high pass sharpening to ur own image with good resolution and observe the effect.

Before Sharpening, Butterfly species : Pea Blue

After sharpening

Few reminders:

1. Better original image provides better flexibility.
2. High pass filter improves contrast a bit.
3. This technique is well suited for photos with blurred background. As such background do not have edges, high pass filter is not applied to that part at all.

Photographing Butterlies - Camera Operation

   

In this post I am discussing some camera techniques explicitly to shoot butterflies. I assume the objective is to get clear, sharp and completely focused object and not discussing how to shoot an artistic shot. 

1. Mode of shooting: A good butterfly photograph should show sharp, entirely focused object with blurred background. To accomplish this, one has to choose aperture and shutter speed wisely. Here I assume ISO 100/200 (we will talk about it later). To shoot such images, aperture may be varied between 5.6 to 16 depend upon light conditions. Shutter speed and aperture acts opposite to each other (Higher f-number, lower the shutter speed). Having said this, if one is firing fill flash, shutter speed is restricted to synchronizing speed (normally 1/200 or 1/250). Thumb rule for shutter speed selection says: Shutter speed should be more or equal to the focal length. For example, when shooting with focal length = 200 mm, shutter speed must be at least 1/200s.This is important factor when selecting lens for photographing butterfly. Aperture will decide the depth of field. Simply say how blur is the background or what part of the frame is focused. Higher the aperture (say f2.8) more blurry the background. 

           With this little theory, lets come back to mode of shooting. Here modes under consideration are Manual, Aperture Priority and Shutter priority. I prefer to shoot in manual mode. This allows to select  shutter speed and aperture independently.  If sunlight is enough, I can achieve perfect exposure with many combinations of shutter speed and aperture. When, aperture/depth of field is priority shoot with aperture priority mode. This fixes the shutter speed. Sometimes shutter priority is preferred to shoot fast moving butterflies ( Mormon), Where continuous fluttering of their wings need to be frozen in the frame, higher shutter speed is necessary (Often 1/500 or above). Two images of Leafblue, are the example towards changing f number and its effect on depth of field. With f5 and descent sunlight I was able to achieve very good Bokeh and descent speed of 1/250. It was limited by synchronizing flash speed as built in flash was used.

As shot, External flash failed to fire.

2. Shoot RAW photos: RAW is just like digital negative of the photograph. It preserves every details and enables user to manipulate them in post processing. Whereas when saved directly in JPEG format, most of the data is lost irreversibly, and nothing great can be achieved in post-processing. Shooting in RAW is very much useful in situations where flash does not fires, achieving perfect exposure is problem (White or Violet surfaces), etc. Every SLR has an option to shoot in RAW and NOT every point shot have it. The only disadvantage RAW shooting offers is that it takes a lot of space. Size of RAW file is approximately 3 times larger than corresponding JPEG image.A typical 8GB card will hold around 300 12-bit RAW images. But one can always carry multiple cards and change them when required.

3. Flash: Always us Fill flash for butterflies, yes even in day light. I prefer to use fill flash always and adjust the shutter speed and aperture to adjust the blending of the fill light. This blending is important otherwise it looks like one has pasted the object into. If one is operating camera in aperture priority mode, this problem is solved by i-TTL facility. It selects amount of flash needed to be casted for perfect exposure, sensing the ambient light condition.

After adjusting exposure of the failed image. 

4. ISO: In simple sense, this is the measure of sensitivity of the camera towards light. Higher the ISO, higher the sensitivity, higher the noise. Generally ISO is setting is not changed in the field. For butterflying on particular day, start with ISO 400 (early morning upto 7am), then gradually start reducing ISO to 100 (at around 11 am in the summer). Obviously this depends on the ambient conditions. In shade, ISO might need to be increased again. So my advice to avoid all this jugglery, one can set ISO 200, a small compromise with noise and achieve maximum shutter and aperture.

Note: All images are copyrighted. (c) Paresh Kale, 2012.