I am in Bali, Indonesia now, and I took my photo tour group to a butterfly farm that had dozens of spectacularly beautiful species of Asian butterflies. Many of the insects were mating, and I was excited to capture this Malay lacewing (Cethosia hypsea) pair with a good background. I shot this with a Canon 100-400mm lens with one extension tube, and this combination enabled me to fill the frame with the subjects. With this kind of magnification, though, depth of field is an issue. I wanted both butterflies tack sharp. Given the deep shade, I was only able to use f/11 (my other settings were 1/1000 and 6400 ISO). To help capture the kind of depth of field I wanted, I made sure that the back of the camera -- i.e. the plane of the digital sensor -- was as parallel to the plane of the wings as possible. To mitigate the noise, I applied Neat Image software in post-processing.
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