Macro Photography – Marbled white butterfly

During the summer months, ever since I’ve had a camera capable of taking good macro photographs, I visit an area of Stevenage called Priors Wood. It’s an area of about 2 to 3 thousand square yards, in the middle of a wooded area and it’s normally teaming with insects and butterflies between late April and late September.

The subject of this picture is a Marbled White butterfly which I took at Priors Wood with a Pentax K200D on July 2nd 2011. It was a particularly warm day and there were hundreds of butterflies fluttering about. As well as this species there were Meadow Browns, Small Skippers, Ringlets and others. I caught this one with an  aperture of F10 @ 1/250 using the Tamron 70-300 mm I used to take macro pictures at the time. It’s interesting that even at f10 most of the butterflies body is out of focus, although the eyes are pretty sharp which is the part of the picture you are drawn to. This was the best image of a Marbled White I got that day – several images were spoiled by camera shake or poor focus.

When I got the picture into post processing, I did a small amount of cropping to make the composition slightly better and added a touch of noise reduction and sharpening in Lightroom.

I think one improvement which could have made this a better picture would be to use some fill in flash to darken the background. That’s an area I want to investigate this coming summer as I have recently bought a Metz 58 flash unit for my Pentax K-5.