Green is my favorite color, so when I saw this Paris peacock butterfly flying around Pokhara, Nepal, I had to pursue it. The crazy part was that it was flying through busy traffic on a main road, and when it rested for a few seconds, it did so at a bus stop on top of mud and trash in the gutter. Not a very attractive background. When a bus came and left, it flew away but then returned within seconds. I was able to grab a few quick shots before the next bus stopped. For maximum depth of field, I made sure the back of the camera (i.e. the plane of the digital sensor) was parallel with the plane of the wings. In Photoshop, I meticulously selected the butterfly including the ultra-fine antennae, with the pen tool and pasted the selection onto an attractive floral background. Backgrounds are just as important as subjects in making a photograph successful. My settings for the butterfly were 1/320, f/16, and 2000 ISO. I needed a small aperture to insure every aspect of the insect was sharp. I took this with a Canon 100-400mm lens which can focus to about 3 feet.
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