Small Tortoiseshell - Aglais urticae

Beautiful colours.

You should use a larger aperture: f/20 required you to up the ISO to 3200 creating a lot of noise on the photo. A larger aperture f/5.6 to f/11 would make the photo a lot sharper and also help blur the background. You don't need a shutter speed of 1/500... You should try to always keep the ISO as low as possible.

Hope this is helpful!

Line

So colorful and picturesque shot!

Best regards Sam!

PDE

The colors and composition are wonderful, I like the overall feel of this image.

I've shot with this lens, my copy was sharpest at F8 when shooting closeups or @300mm. If you're handholding, then 1/500 is about the minimum usable shutter speed for this type of work on a crop body such as the 60D, even with IS. If you're using a tripod, you can go a little lower but subject movement comes into play. As Line says, ISO 3200 creates a lot of noise (60D/7D start to show it above ISO 800)-there are programs such as Denoise5 which handle it quite well, much better than Photoshop or Canon's DPP.  

Line & Randall,

the story is that I was using this camera for nearly the first time & had the settings not yet right, that is: I hadn't limited the automatic ISO setting to maximally 1600. Yet, the scene in front of my camera didn't warrant a lot of fiddling with the machine, I shot & shot before the critter left.

Thanks very much for your thoughtful critiques!

Pierre,

thanks very much for showing your enthusiasm for Mother Nature's colour scheme!

CHEERS to all of you!

Sam