This female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail is the first butterfly I have spotted this season. She is so perfect she must be newly emerged, and is nectaring on the blooms of a Mohawk viburnum in my yard.
Any
Is this a composite: No
Canon 60D, Canon 70-300mm IS USM zoom, f/11, 1/750 sec., ISO 800, Hand Held. Processed in ACR and PSE 2020 for exposure and sharpness. Topaz De-noise applied.
That perfection doesn’t last long so great to share it while it does. It will be a couple months before I see these beauties here, but we get tons of them. Terrific sharpness all through the image. I brought it into Ps for a little dodging and burning so we could see more of those amazing wings.
Terry, an excellent combination to have before your camera at once, the beautiful flowers and lovely butterfly. Nice details throughout both. Very nicely done. I hate to even have a nit with such an image, but by using f11, the background is a bit distracting, not bad, but the brighter porting on the left, if it could be toned down, to me might help this wonderful image even more. Great shot.
Thanks, @Kris_Smith . I’ll enjoy her while she’s still in near-perfect condition!
Hi @Shirley_Freeman . I chose that dof in an attempt to get all the butterfly and her immediate surroundings in sharp focus. Thanks!
Terry, I understand. I would have used f11 also, as I would much rather have all the things in focus that I want, and not worry so much about the background being out of focus as much as I would like. It is an excellent image.
Terry, this is an excellent view of both the Swallowtail and the Viburnum. The colors in both look great. Good work.
Thanks, Mark. I appreciate you viewing and commenting.
Beautiful! I do like Kris’s suggestion.
The BG was my first thought – that it could be softer. With the sharpness of the flower and butterfly, it would be easy to select them and refine the edges as needed, and inverse the selection and do a Field Blur on the top part of the BG (Filter > Blur Gallery > Field Blur). That won’t spill over the selection like a Gaussian Blur will.
Your post doesn’t have an embedded profile; you should convert to sRGB and embed (tag) the profile to insure people will see the colors as correctly as possible.
Thanks! Not sure PSE 2020 has all those functions, but I’ll check. I do have the sRGB profile set up, but it doesn’t show up in the metadata for some reason.
Terry,
Thats spot on with the details, and perfect dof. Very well done
Balan Vinod
Diane’s edits provide some selective focus to the image, but the original is quite good as well. Focus and color are top notch. It is always good to use smaller apertures when shooting butterflies because they often move their wings out of the plane of focus. Well done and congrats on the EP…Jim
Hi, Jim. Always good to see another perspective. Thanks
