Nikon D7100, Nikkor 85mm micro/macro
ISO 2000, f25 @1/640
1 Like
A nice look at this Gulf Fritillary, Greg. Love the color pallet. Nice out of focus background. Nice position that you caught the butterfly in. When I pull it up in large view though, the eye becomes a bit soft, so even though I can’t see that in in the smaller version, my guess is that the focus was off ever so slightly. Did you crop this, as I see you were shooting an 85 mm, and you are in pretty close in this frame? Just thinking the crop might have softened the details some, although there are other portions looking nice a sharp. For me, I find it hard with the moving critters as these guys to always have the focus point right on the eye. When I do have it and click, that partial second the shutter is clicking, he has moved just enough that the focus point can be near the eye, but not quite on it. I am hoping that you shot this in a burst, and looking through some of the others the camera may have made the focus you desired, if it is a focus issue. It is still a fine shot, as it is, especially if you have no plans to print it large. Macro shooting can be challenging (is for me), but I so enjoy looking closer at the tiny creatures on my screen. It keeps me going back in nature, looking for them.
Greg: Really nice wing position and I think your POF is just about right. I also like the perch. I’m not certain of the ID except that I know it is not a Gulf Fritillary which has an almost solid and bright orange top wing and a lot of red and silver on the underwing. Would help to know where you shot this. It looks like a breed of checkerspot which is a close relative of the fritillary family. Also, please try to resize your images for posting to 1500 pixels on the long side. Large images put a little strain on the server and make your image a better target for image thieves. Keep the posts coming. >=))>
I believe you are right. I haven’t unpacked my reference books yet but I should have seen the difference between this one and one I posted last year. Thanks for the comments
This one is for sure a gulf fritillary. A real nice shot for this one as well. >=))>
Greg, to me, the details in the eye are awesome and although I’m not about to try, I’m sure someone could count the hairs in the head. A fine pose and background. As an aside, the smaller view looks a hair over sharpened, but the large view is fine. That’s something that the NPN software seems to do, add a bit of sharpening to the uploaded file as it creates the smaller version of the image. That’s also a very good looking bunch of iron weed.