What kind of adaptions can I put on my phone’s camera lens to improve or stylize the picture?
What do you think? Any tips for capturing butterflies/taking photos of them?
Using an Oppo F1s - Rear Camera - 13 MP, f/2.2, 1/3", PDAF using HDR mode.
Welcome to NPN. I can say personally that I have been a member for 13+ years, and have learned an immense amount, not only from critiques of my efforts, but by critiquing and plain old looking at the results of others and how they achieved the good images they made.
First let me say butterflies are difficult subjects, especially those in flight. You caught one, almost in focus. The moving wings are perfectly acceptable in a flight picture. The color is a bit unsaturated, and the wing barely clipped on the left is a no-no. Ideally, a placement in the upper or lower left thirds point (think of tic-tac-toe dividing the image), giving the b’fly room to fly across the frame, but being well entered into the frame. Basic composition 101.
I could go on, but I don’t want to try to pack too much into a critique. What I would like for you to do is study here and in any book on basic photography and learn the difference between a good snapshot (which this is) and a good image (to which you are headed in the right direction). And keep taking pictures!
Hey, thanks Phil! This is very useful critique. I actually have another one with the butterfly in the middle, but also a little cut off.
Here it is:
Hi Christopher. Welcome to NPN and the Human and Fauna forum. Normally this would probably get posted in the Macro Forum, but I’m not going to bother moving it as I don’t think that’s particularly critical for this image. Phil gave you some excellent advice.
I do know that there are add-on lenses for camera phones, though I don’t know much of anything about them. I believe there’s a company called Moment that makes cases and lenses such that the lenses snap in place on the case. I know literally nothing about the software available for phone image processing, though I do know you can co some amazing things with it. The major drawback of phones for my taste are two. One, you have to sight by looking at a screen. For me, I have a terrible time following action that way-but maybe I’m just too old. The real issue is that you have no control over the aperture of the lens-it’s fixed. That means that you have no control over the depth of field, so it’s very difficult to get your subject to stand out from the background.
As for tips on capturing butterflies, I think the best one is to find a place where they’re either nectaring (the right flowers) or find a place where they’re likely to be laying eggs. The second actually will let you target particular species, since most butterflies are fairly particular about the kind of plants they’ll lay eggs on. For instance the Monarch lays eggs on milkweeds. I don’t think they care that much about the particular species of milkweed, since they’ve been introduced to Oahu where they frequent a giant species of milkweed that looks more like a large bush or small tree than what we normally think of as milkweed. A good butterfly book or one of the phone apps on butterflies can lead you in the right direction there.
It’s kind of the wrong time of year in most of the northern hemisphere, but come spring and summer, you’ll start weeing quite a few butterfly posts in the Macro/Close-up forums. Reading those posts and the critiques of them will help you a lot.
Again, welcome to NPN and thanks for posting.
Thanks for the advice, I will take that well into mind! 
