This Tuesday I noticed a few cowslips raising their heads as I made my usual early morning bike ride through the park. But a fortnight of fairly cold early April temperatures seems to have slowed down the arrival of Spring. So I decided that it wasn't worth making a spring wildflower trip into the Derbyshire Dales just yet.
Instead I opted to visit the Butterfly House in North Anston, near Sheffield. This is one of those places that provides a tropical environment, in what is essentially a large greenhouse, in order to breed and display tropical butterflies. I thought I could use a trip there as a practice session, to hone my skills for photographing wild butterflies in the coming summer months.
I use different techniques for photographing wild flowers to those I use for butterflies. Because flowers are attached to the ground I invariably use a small tripod at ground level and use manual focus on my fold-out LCD screen. This enables me to work at ground level without lying on the ground to look through the optical viewfinder. With the camera on a tripod I can select any aperture (to control the exact amount of depth of field I want), even if this means a slow shutter speed is required. The only fly in the ointment being that the slightest breeze sends most flowers into a St Vitus Dance, so a slow shutter speed means that the images can be blurred (sometimes this makes a nice 'artistic' shot). So I can spend a lot of time just waiting for that vital second or two when the breeze drops and the flower becomes still.
For butterflies, which flit around from one position to another, I find a tripod just too cumbersome, and so resort to handheld shots and rely on autofocus rather than manual focus. Sometimes I will use the optical viewfinder and sometimes I will use the LCD screen, especially where the target is a bit high up or low down. Depending on light conditions, I will sometimes use flash, but prefer not too as flash with close-up photography can lead to unnatural dark backgrounds.
Choosing between all these options, whilst stealthily creeping up on a butterfly so as not to disturb it, certainly makes photographing them a challenging past-time. Hence the need for a practice session on captive butterflies.
When you retire you think you can go out visiting places in mid-week, when everything is quiet because the kids are all at school. What you don't realise is just how little time kids actually seem to spend in school. It always seems to be half-term, or an INSET day, or something like that. This week I completely forgot that, although Easter had actually happened a couple of weeks ago, it was so early this year that it played havoc with normal term lengths. This caused many local authorities to delay their 'Easter' holidays for a fortnight. Going to an attraction which is so popular with parents trying to keep kids occupied during school holidays was a bad decision!
Entering the butterfly house they were everywhere (kids that is) whilst the butterflies seemed to be hiding up in the rafters to keep away from the sticky fingers and the high decibel shrieking going on below them.
Eventually both the butterflies and I began to acclimatise to the havoc and I began to spot one or two on flowers and leaves at lower levels. The larger, and more exotic ones, however, tantalisingly stayed up near the rafters, occasionally fluttering past my head, but never settling on anything remotely within my reach.
All told I took about a hundred shots, experimenting with aperture and speed settings, most of which had to be discarded for technical shortcomings. What was worse, though, was the number I had to discard because the butterflies themselves were imperfect specimens, with bits of their wings missing. Here's a typical example:-
It's a bit galling to get the right exposure, everyting in focus, nicely composed and then find the butterfly is imperfect. For some reason I just don't notice the imperfections when concentrating on the technicalities. This also happens when I'm photograhing flowers and don't notice imperfections in petals.
Anyway, with this particular butterfly I did get a 'head and shoulders' shot which doesn't show the imperfections:-
To conclude with here is the shot I liked best. Unfortunately the tips of its wings were missing, but I thought the shot was good enough to merit a bit of extra work to rescue it. I have reconstructed its wing tips using the clone tool:-
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