Commander - Life Cycle

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Common Baron (Euthalia aconthea)

Common baron is a common medium sized graceful butterfly. Brown in color, female and male differs slightly on upper wings. Female has prominent white spots on upper-side. Species can be confused with chocolate pansy.  Female is seen quite often basking on the big leaf. Having large abdomen, powers it a powerful flight. To find a baron male is a rare treat to the eyes. Male can be found near wet patches, puddling during noon time. Egg is laid singly, preferred LHP is cashew-nut. Egg is domed shape, green in color and has spines all over it. Caterpillar rests on upper side of the leaf, aligned with the mid-rib. Its spiny and looks like thin lines of the leaf. Even being on the upper side of the leaf, camouflage protects it. When grown enough, it forms a pupa below the leaf. Its attached to the leaf with "cremaster". Pupa is often parasitized  by chalcid wasps [1]. 

Front and side view of common baron egg on cashew-nut leaf

Quick Facts:
Name: Common Baron
Scientific Name: Euthalia aconthea
Wingspan : 50 to 60 mm
Host plant: Mango, cashew-nut

Baron cat on cashew=nut leaf

Pupa

Female basking

Cashew-nut tree, with fruit and flowers

Mango tree, Mangifera Indica

Butterfly predators

Impeccable Yellow spider in action

 Butterfly is lower order species of the food chain. Its eaten by many of the predators in every life stage of its. Most common ones are birds, spiders, robber fly and wasps. Birds and spiders catch them full grown. An interesting video was captured by Swapnil Lokhande, in which a bird is seen with a butterfly. Bird seems enjoying the meal, the butterfly being eaten was Tawney Rajah. It was sad part for us as Tawney Rajah is seen quite rarely on campus.

Common wanderer caught by spider

Spiders normally seats on the flower and wait for the prey to appear for nectoring. It seats quietly and camouflages excellently with the flower. After setting himself up, its mere the luck of the butterfly decides. Set-up hardly misses any butterfly and rarely seen one escaping the trap. A small spider can catch large butterflies as well. We have seen a common wanderer male caught by a small spider before our eye could blink. Spider takes a long time to kill the prey and eats slowly. Spider net is also used by certain spiders species to catch the insects. Butterflies with large wingspan are primary victims, due to size easily gets entangled in the web.

Close view of white spider on pink-white flower

 

Spider chasing Pierrot 

Robber fly with catch,  grass yellow is the victim

Insects in the dipters family asilidae are commonly called robber flies. Catches for almost every kind of small insect, list is long. List includes butterflies, beetles, moths, bees, ants, dragonflies, damselflies, some wasps, grasshoppers and even spiders [1]. Wasps lay eggs inside the pupa pinning them and the babies after hatching out eats caterpillar inside pupa. Infected pupa can be easily identified. Spoiled pupa changes color to dark black after few days and doesn't pupate. On campus, tiger species and Tailed jay pupa's commonly found infected by some wasps.Some wasps may even infect a caterpillar and feed on it.

Lime cat attacked by wasps

Dragonflies finds a butterfly

Reference:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilidae

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.

Camera and accessories selection for macro photography

This post is about the camera and lens selection, particularly for shooting butterflies and flowers.

Lens Selection (For SLR):
This is really dance on the tight rope.
1. A macro lens at least 90 mm, with 1:1 reproduction. Lenses from 90 mm to 105 mm are handy lenses with descent minimum focus distance and focal length. 180 mm lens are bulky, costly however produces good bokeh. A 300 mm lens with VR will also serve fantastic overall. As it do not create 1:1 image, may face little problem with very small ones. This focal length will give nice bokeh and can be used with 2X TC for birding if fast enough.
2. VR/OS/IS is must. Image stabilization or Vibration Reduction technology increases the possibility of sharp images. VR I is sufficient. This lenses comes with more money obviously.
3. Internal focusing (IF) allows the focusing without changing the length of the lens barrel.

Camera selection:
 Many asks which one is better, Canon or Nikon? I say both are good, depending what kind of use u wish. Nikon has great low light capture probabilities. Canon can shoot good video. Canon 1D is famous in Hollywood for supportive shoots. For butterflying any of them will do. Here is the list of characteristics a camera should have to shoot macro photos.
1. Raw shooting ability.
2. Manual, shutter priority and aperture priority mode.
If SLR, then I would prefer to have at least a semi-pro body (Nikon D90/D7000 or Canon 60D/ 7d). Major advantages with this category is the built in motor.

If one is not using a SLR then,
1. Zoom around 12x to 18X is sufficient.
2. 12 MP is sufficient.
In this category I have seen pretty good results with Panasonic Lumix FZ series. 

Accessories selection:

1.  Battery: Cameras like D7000 can deliver upto 1000 snaps without flash/external flash. So for a short trip I dont see necessity of carrying extra battery. Even same would be the case with canon 60D or 7D. However, batteries of point and shoot camera exhausts after about 250 snaps. In that case one may need extra one or in some case two batteries per day. Better to go for original batteries. In case of extensive use of the batteries, non-branded batteries can give good returns on money invested. 

2. Flash: External flash is indeed necessary. It reveals true colors, tinges and hues on the butterfly body. Built-in flash is not sufficient for this. I have not yet used ring flash or R1-C1. But from the results people are posting, they seems to add more drama and story to the image as compared to external flash. Obviously a charger and rechargeable cells for external flash. Duracell batteries seems to last ling than most other n the category.Ranges from 5000 to 30000 RS or more. Branded ones are advisable as they provide i-TTL operation.

3. Tripod: Tripod wont be that useful in the field shooting last stage butterfly. It is useful when shooting early stages  like egg, larva. Buy a strong tripod with ball head. Cost may be from 8000 to 20000 Rs and more. Cheap tripods without ball head are difficult for operation, doesent take gear weight, shakes even with breeze. To remind, wind is the worst enemy for macro photography.

4. Storage: as I said Raw shooting is better. To do this, one needs more storage. Fast cards with data transfer rates above 30 mbps or more would be helpful. Cards in "Extreme" category, has such writing speeds. Also they have lots of protective feature against shocks, X-ray, water etc. Better to invest in them once. Also dont use card more than 8GB (optimistic value, most will suggest 4Gb some 2GB even). This slows down the writing process. 

5. Extension tubes: Will serve excellent if the object is static. One can be very near to the object and get very good magnification. Absence of any glass material, so doesn't cause any optical loss. Comes for about 8000 Rs. Kenko is good brand. My anticipation is, when used with lens like 50mm f1.4, can give sharpest results, competing even a macro lens. The disadvantage is the operation. Many times time needs manual focusing. Which makes it difficult for shooting moving objects. 

6. Tele-converter: Its a lens, with ability to magnify picture by 1.4X, 1.7X, 2X times. Also modifies the magnification in the same ration i.e. 1:2 lens will be 1:1 with 2X TC. Costs around 10,000 Rs. As it has glass elements, optical quality reduces. Useful with fast lens (aperture at-least 2.8 or so). Better to invest in some good lens than mounting this with other cheap lens. Not advisable.