I was in a prairie yesterday (Bobolink Meadow) that was filled with yellow wild flowers and monarch butterflies. Is there a way I could have subdued the yellow flowers in camera to not take away from the butter fly? I used a Canon T5i, Sigma 150-600 C ISO 800 Shutter 1/800 @ F6.3. Skies were overcast and the wind was strong.
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Brian, the options for changing image brightness in camera are limited to exposure compensation and that changes everything. It’s easier to adjust specific brightness in post processing provided your shooting RAW. In RAW processing there are a number of ways to adjust brightness over limited brightness regions as well as adjusting the tone curve.
As far as this image goes, I think it looks very good. The Monarch stands out nicely and the clump of flowers and seed heads that it’s about to land on look good and are well placed. Having the background filled with more sunflowers works very well. You could pull out a bit more detail in the in-focus flowers with some tweaking of the bright tones. You could also get similar detail to show with some subtle burning-in of those flowers. Overall, this looks like a very successful shot of this Monarch with her landing gear down.
A nice in flight shot of the Monarch, Brian. Not always easy to accomplish, or least for me.
I will just echo Mark’s critique. He got the sex right too!
The overcast sky served you well. Given the strong wind I find it amazing that you have been able to catch the Monarch in flight this sharp. I very much like the colours of the Monarch returning in the flowers. The only way, as far as I can see, to get more separation between butterfly and flowers would have been a larger aperture. In post processing you could try to create an out-of-focus mask and use that to darken the background. A crop, bottom and left, could also put more emphasis on the butterfly. Anyway, I like it.
Thank you everyone for your feedback. I have a lot to learn.
Phil, you made me chuckle though. How can you tell the sex of a butterfly?