Colorado: Black Swallowtail Gestation

The next image, in a day or so, will be of the caterpillar's change

into a chrysalis. It did go on to change successfully into a beautiful

Black Swallowtail butterfly.

Nice unusual pastel colours. Pleasing to the eye... Great compostion and texture detail. Don't see anything to change really. Cheers, Alex

I agree. Nothing to really reccomend. Good work.

Fabulous light and color, almost mindless.

The temptation now is to intellectualize when there is no place for it. The center is the brightness about 1/3 of the way down from the "head," say, near the stomach. The tail is the tail. But the head, well, it's just not what one would expect in a head.

Not intellectually, anyway.

Very nice colors. Can`t see a possibility for improvement

The head shape is the precursor to the metamorphasis into a chrysalis. This caterpillar was perfectly formed when active and made a normal transition to a butterfly in all respects. Note the slender thread it wove which holds it to the stem.

It isn't a Kodak Gray Card but a white piece of board. This was shot as described with the Mamiya RB67 and the 65mm lens. The 65 was the only lens I could focus close enough with on the RB because of the bellows limitations. On the RB the lenses don't focus, the bellows does. It was stopped down to f/32 plus bellows factor and this is probably cropped to 80% of the 6cm x 7cm frame. It was lit with a very powerful studio strobe which didn't seem to bother the insect at all. The 65mm was always the sharpest of my RB lenses.

Wonderful soft lighting for all the nice details. The background is nice and smooth. Wonderful subtlety at work here. Did you also try one with a weak fill flash? I am just wondering how that might look.

This was shot with a Speedotron studio strobe. Its minimum power was 200 watt-seconds (200 joules). It was in a homemade softbox and the fill light was just another white card just to the left of the insect. 200 watt-seconds is a guide number of about 400 with ISO 100 film. In other words, it was all fill flash as I shot this image in the middle of the night in my basement.

Your single light portrait works very good for this simple composition. Exposure is right one. Can't wait to see the whole series.

Ah, I saw f/3.5 by the Lens and thought that was the aperture used here. Duh.

 

Thanks for the technical info, you must be part elephant to remember all that stuff.

The only part of me that's elephant is my waistline. The image is on 6x7 film and I had just sold my RB67 to buy the D60 so I remember it had to be the 65mm lens as was the only one that would focus close. I had to stop it down to the max. Now, here's the clinker, I think the 65mm only went to f/32 so that was a guess. Some of my view camera lenses went to f/64. They're all gone now!

Wonderfull!