Basking Butterfly

Nicely captured, the level of sharpness is impressive.

Excellent capture Ellery. Fine colours. What lens are you using. Do you handhold??? Just curious, excellent results.

hey gail...sorry for the severe delay, been off PN for a while....busy busy family life....

I use a D90 and in this case I used a 180mm tamron macro lens...this was one of my first attempts at butterfly macro....

This was almost mid-day light, and these specimens were quite active...use of tripod was futile....even a monopod too limiting.

I am having a hard time remembering if I supplemented with flash...I think I may have...I am SURE I was handholding....ill go back and look at the exif data and see...but I THINK I was using my home made flash bracket setup...just for that bit of fill light I needed here...

I have not yet been able to try it, but the way to get these shots with a tripod is to get on location at like dawn when they are very very calm...I plan on trying this out this season for sure...

I was just paroozing the PN article on this very subject as it relates:

http://photo.net/comments/persistent-add?page_id=870

I have a 90mm macro...this would work great for the very early morning attempts...but believe me...no amount of patience in the heat of the day will help you much trying this with the 90mm - I tried...thus purchasing the 180mm lol