PHOTOGRAPHING BUTTERFLIES

In the online courses I teach at Betterphoto.com, I see a lot of butterfly pictures, particularly in the summer. The biggest problem I see in the students' work is that the depth of field that is too shallow. As you move in close to fill the frame with a small subject, depth of field is lost and the only way to get it back is to use a small lens aperture. That reduces the light, of course, forcing the shutter speed to be slow. No one wants a slow shutter speed when shooting fast-moving insects.



To capture an artistic picture of a butterfly in nature is very, very difficult Depth of field is only one issue. A cluttered background is another, and distracting foregrounds are also a problem. The only way to control the foreground, the background, the depth of field, and the lighting is to capture the butterflies and photograph them under controlled circumstances. This is what I did just an hour ago with the buckeye butterfly you see reproduced here. Here is the procedure I used:

1. I captured the insect with a butterfly net as it was searching for flowers in my garden.
2. I put the butterfly in a small Tupperware container in the refrigerator to cool it down (butterflies can't fly if they get too cold).
3. I waited 10 minutes and then took it out and placed it, gently, on a leaf in my kitchen.
4. Butterflies rest with their wings folded, so I placed a lamp, minus the shade, near the butterfly. After 2 or 3 minutes, the butterfly opened its wings to warm the wing muscles, thinking the light bulb was the sun.
5. I used a Canon ring flash set to ETTL. My 50mm macro lens was set to f/32, and the camera's exposure function was set to manual mode. I placed one extension tube between the camera body and the lens to fill the frame with the buckeye butterfly.

In this way, I had total control and made a perfect image. Might I have tried another type of lighting? Sure, but this is what I wanted for this setup. When I had finished, I released the butterfly outside and wished it a nice day.

CONCOURSE D'ELEGANCE PHOTOGRAPHY

Last weekend I traveled to the Detroit area specifically to photograph some of the most beautiful cars in the world. Most of the automobiles were classics, from horseless carriages (prior to 1915) to the antiques (up to 1927) through the classics (to World War II). The annual event was held on the grounds at the stately Meadowbrook mansion built by the Dodge family. Of course, I had to deal with hundreds of people and less than ideal backgrounds, so the pictures you see here have had new backgrounds pasted behind each car to make the images look much more beautiful than had I not done this. Over the next week, I'll be uploading more of these to my website in the category Americana and then classic cars. It obviously takes time to do the Photoshop work and make it look flawless, as if I had arranged with each owner to park their vehicle in an ideal location.



Each car has its own history. For example, the rare 1932 Bucciali (only 5 made in the world) was built by a French World War I pilot. The flying stork on the side of the automobile was the emblem of his squadron and it was painted on their bi-wing fighter aircraft.



My favorite car in the show was a 1929 Duesenberg. It was a work of art, and it was thrilling to look at it through my camera. The two-tone red and blue made a stunning visual statement, and the elegant and luxurious lines took my breath away. All of these pictures were taken using a tripod, a low ISO, and a small lens aperture for maximum depth of field.

MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY WITH A RING FLASH

I found this guy in my garden yesterday. It's a red velvet ant, and it was too intriguing to pass up the opportunity to get a good photograph. I recently created a new insect category on my website, and I thought this unique subject would be a perfect addition.

I put the velvet ant into a Tupperware container and then put that in the refrigerator. The insect moved very quickly on the ground, and this made macro photography impossible. By cooling it down, the velvet ant virtually went to sleep. I put a leaf on my kitchen counter and after a few minutes in the refrigerator, I put the insect on the leaf. I used a Canon ring flash to light the small set up, and to fill the frame with the colorful subject I used a 50mm macro lens with one extension tube.

Depth of field is extremely important in macro work, so I set the lens to f/32 and used manual exposure mode on the camera. ETTL on the flash automatically calculated a perfect exposure without even bracketing. I hand held the camera because as soon as the velvet ant warmed up a bit it started moving. I could only get a couple of shots before it became too active again, and then I put it back into the refrigerator for another 3 or 4 minutes until it was knocked out. I repeated this process about five times until I was happy with my pictures, and then I put the insect back into the garden, apparently unaffected by the photo session and the chilly temperature.

NIK COLOR EFEX PRO 3.0

It's fun to revisit previously taken pictures and try something new with them. I conducted a Photoshop workshop in my home this past weekend, and one of the several plug-ins I demonstrated during the two days was Nik Color Efex Pro. I used this portrait of a Javanese bride taken in 2002, and one of the filters (old photo) I experimented with created a unique and beautiful rendition of the color original that makes it look like a print from the turn of the last century.


Nik has many intriguing filters to work with, and there are other plug-in filters in my arsenal (like Topaz Adjust and Simplify, Flood, Snap Art, and Eye Candy) that offer artistic possibilities that go beyond what Photoshop can do by itself. I often discover amazing images within my photo library that were waiting to be discovered simply by opening up the pictures and experimenting with these creative tools.

The chest piece this young lady is wearing is hand-woven live flowers. This is a traditional part of the attire that brides from the island of Java wear. To set this shot up, I paid three women to work for an entire day sewing the flowers for this model.

REVISITING PAST PHOTOGRAPHS

It's fun to go back over past images and come up with new treatments. Perhaps you can apply a technique you've just learned, or you might try a new background on for size. I did that this morning with one of the favorite Venetian costumes I photographed during one of Carnival in Venice workshops I conduct every year. I shot this model in front of the Doge's palace in the long arched corridor, and I cut her out using the pen tool in Photoshop because this is the most precise method of making a selection -- although it's the most time consuming. I put her in front of a picture of San Giorgio Island and the famous gondolas lined up in San Marco Square, but before I pasted her in place I applied Topaz Adjust to make the background a little more interesting. These two components, the background and the model, were sitting in my files for two years just waiting to be combined.

You also have hundreds or thousands of such combinations of pictures waiting to be discovered. Go through your images with this in mind and see what you can come up with.

OIL & WATER

I had some fun yesterday photographing oil and water mixed together. I used a shallow glass bowl with a flat bottom and filled it partially with water. Then I placed it about two feet above a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 compute paper on which I had smeared various colors of paint. I dropped a tiny amount of vegetable oil in the water, and positioned a single flash off-camera pointing to the paint. I triggered the flash with a wireless unit, the Pocket Wizard. With a 50mm macro lens and one extension tube, I took some shots at f/16 but didn't like the results because the paint in the background was too defined due to the extensive depth of field. When I used f/8, I liked the results much better.



I hand held the camera and made sure the back of the camera was as parallel as possible to the surface of the water. When the camera back (i.e. the plane of the sensor) is parallel, you can have complete depth of field of the water's surface at any lens aperture.



For a variation, I pointed the flash up to the water bowl from below and created space-like images that I thought were pretty cool.



I used 100 ISO for these pictures and a daylight white balance.

EXOTIC INSECT PHOTOGRAPHY

You can buy dried and packaged exotic insects from all over the world, like this cicada from Thailand, and then photograph them in natural looking situations. Online insect suppliers have a huge number of species, listed usually by Latin name, and even though you may not know what the insects look like, you can do a search by the scientific nomenclature and see whether or not you'd like to purchase the dead specimen.

The picture you see here isn't biologically correct because cicadas don't rest with their wings outstretched. However, I preferred to shoot it this way simply because its wings are so beautiful.

The technique is to put the packaged insects in Tupperware (with the lid) with a wet paper towel. The moisture relaxes the insect parts, and then with very tiny pins (available online through insect supply companies), you can put the legs and antennae into a natural looking position. In a day the insect dries, and it will then maintain the position established when the pins held the body parts exactly as you wanted. Then it can be placed on a natural background and photographed.

The photo you see here was taken with a Canon ringflash and a 50mm macro lens. I used the camera on manual exposure mode, the flash was set to ETTL, and the lens aperture was f/32. The green background is a 13 x 19 inch print of out of focus foliage.