This is a large wood nymph butterfly (also called a rice paper butterfly) I photographed in the Philippines. I took this with my old 6x7cm film camera, the Mamiya RZ 67, and with medium formats like this the depth of field is more shallow than with 35mm format cameras. That means in order to get as much depth of field as possible on small subjects, the film plane (in today's world this means the plane of the digital sensor) has to be as parallel as possible to the plane of the subject. That's what I did here so the heliconia flower as well as the wings of the butterfly were sharp. For virtually all of my photographs taken with the Mamiya, I used a tripod, and for all macro photography I used f/32. In this case, that meant the background came into focus too much. It was too distracting so I replaced tangle of leaves and branches with a background of attractively out of focus leaves. I used a 250mm lens plus an extension tube to focus closely while the camera position was several feet away.
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