Central and South America have an enormous number of stunning butterflies, and even though my focus was on carnival, I'm always on the lookout for great shots of these dazzling insects. I found this beautiful Malachite butterfly in a garden planted with various plants to attract butterflies. Depth of field is a critical issue when photographing butterflies because they often hold their wings in a dihedral shape. So, I waited for the butterfly to flatten its wings which it did fleetingly. I tried to make the back of the camera (i.e. the plane of the digital sensor) as parallel as possible with the plane of the wings because that helped increase depth of field. My settings for this shot taken with the 100-400mm Canon zoom were 1/40, f/16, 400 ISO. In the heat of the moment I didn't realize my shutter speed was so slow, but the image stabilization helped me get a sharp picture. The focal length this was captured with was 400mm, and I was really pushing the envelope with such a slow shutter. I should have raised the ISO to 1600, and that would have given me 1/160th of a second for the shutter. Still, the picture turned out sharp. In Photoshop, I darkened the background foliage so the butterfly really pops.
3 Comments
Mar 6, 2017, 9:00:28 PM
Bob Vestal - Thanks, Jim. I understand your strategy. Makes perfect sense and very good advice to remember.
Mar 6, 2017, 6:03:02 AM
Jim - Hi Bob, Thank you for the compliment. In a picture like this, I don't make any kind of estimate of depth of field. If I don't like the DOF, I can always change the background. The proximity of the butterfly to the background was out of my control, and the insect kept moving from flower to flower. There simply wasn't time to think about the background. What was more important was getting the butterfly sharp. It kept opening and closing its wings, so I had to coordinate my shot with the instant the wings were flat. This helped insure the entire insect was sharp. Even if I focused my attention on the DOF, it wouldn't be a quantitative estimate. It would only be a mental approximation based on experience. But like I said, my priority was sharpness of the butterfly.
Mar 5, 2017, 10:43:43 PM
Bob Vestal - This is beautiful, Jim. You have a nice blurred background even though you were at f/16, so I am guessing it was a fair distance from the branch with the butterfly. Can you estimate the DOF at f/16 and 400mm?