Graphic shapes

I worked very hard to get a good shot of this butterfly in Slovakia. It was very windy, and the grasses were blowing all over the place. Every once in a while there would be a lull in the wind and that's when I was able to shoot the picture you see at right.

In my on-line courses, I get a lot of butterfly pictures to critique. These insects are very challenging to photograph, and one of the reasons is that depth of field is usually limited in the field. Wings that should be sharp often aren't. Another reason is that the graphic shape of the wings are everything. If they are angled in an unattractive manor, they just won't look good.

Compare these two images. In the first one, the wings are nicely spread out and -- this is important -- I positioned the camera so the back of it was parallel with the plane of the wings. This gave me a lot more depth of field than had I angled the camera to be oblique with the plane of the butterfly's wings. In the second shot, the right fore- and hindwings were closer to the lens than the body and the wings on the left side, and due to the shallow depth of field I was forced to use, the foreground wings are not sharp. To my way of thinking, this makes the second picture not successful.

Notice the background, too. In the first picture, it is nicely blurred and it makes a very attractive backdrop. In the second shot, it's much more obtrusive. That one diagonal stem that is seen in the upper portion of the frame is quite distracting.