I photographed this malachite butterfly in Brazil with a 100-400mm Canon zoom set to 400mm. Because telephotos have shallow depth of field, even my f/16 lens aperture wasn't small enough to render the entire insect sharp if I took the picture from an oblique angle. Therefore, I moved slowly, not wanting to make the butterfly take flight, and stood directly above it. This way, the back of the camera (i.e. the plane of the digital sensor), was parallel with the plane of the wings. That enabled me to capture the beautiful detail with tack sharp clarity. My other settings were 1/40 and 400 ISO. Since I was handholding the camera, this shutter speed was much too slow for the focal length even though I was using image stabilization. It turned out the image is sharp, but I should have raised the ISO so I could then increase the speed of the shutter to 1/400.
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