week 14: Butterflies

Yes, I missed another week. This time I didn't even have a processed photo I could put up later, so my project will now end one week later. On the up side I've finally got myself a DSLR and I'm absolutely loving it. There is no way I would have gotten this clarity and this shallow a depth of field on my previous camera. Off course it does take some getting used to, since I'm now using an optical view finder rather than a digital lcd screen, the only indication that my exposure is off is a small flickering number at the bottom which is quite easy not to notice.... I've had quite a number of almost black photos before I worked that one out. But they were all taken in my back garden so it was no problem.

Right, onto this week's photo; The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London has a spring/summer exhibition of live butterflies. Can you believe I've lived in London for 6 years and somehow I've never visited the NHM? Well, not counting their yearly ice-rink which I have been to. Its a beautiful building and they allow camera's inside! So I will be spending quite a bit of time over the next couple of month there. Not that the butterflies was actually in the building. They created a kind of a greenhouse setup on the lawn outside.

Butterflies, I have discovered must like a hot humid climate. My lens, does not. The first couple of shots I took were all awfully misty. But as my camera and I adjusted, we came to appreciate the wealth of butterflies they have in there. Most of the ones were very brightly coloured, black and red, bright blue, yellow with black stripes etc. Some of them never seem to sit down and others did not move for the entire time I looked at them. Despite various google searches I still don't know what the name or family of the butterfly in my picture is. I should have asked at the butterfly enclosure, but at that stage I didn't know which one of my 126 photos I would be using.

When I read up about photographing butterflies one of the recommendations that keeps coming up is to use a long focal length (preferably macro lens off course). And in the wild it makes sense, but in an enclosure like the one I was at it became quite difficult at times because the butterflies were all over and I just could not focus on the close ones.  The amount of people in there at one time was also quite staggering. And I have discovered that holding and taking photos with a 70-300mm zoom lens is really hard on the hands - no wonder people use tripods with that kind of lens!

I'm off to sunny (I hope!) South Africa from Wednesday onwards, so my next blog entry will most likely not be until after 29 April. Happy Easter holidays everyone!