giant swallowtail

This is an absolutely interesting shot. since you have selected a very appropriate focal length that has squeezed all the beauty of the bouquet, the butterfly, and the purple-dappled background. The lighting condition has been proper too with the sun, I guess, shining from above. The color scheme is split complementary which is more harmonious than a complementary. Your composition has picked the butterfly as the primary subject of interest and the flowers as the second.

There are certain drawbacks ( some of which I am not really sure can be called that), but anyway, they can be given a second thought for the future shots. The one I am not sure is a defect is the blur in the wings and the tail of the insect

unless you intended to capture the graphic movement. The next one is the post processing that has agitated the background, turning to be noisy and showing traces of slight banding as the result of pushing the dynamic range envelope or repeated post-process interpolation that can drop some grayscale values or displace them. That's all. a little more blur into the background by the Gaussian blur mask can do the job.

Hi Arash,

Thank you for your extensive critique and commentary on my image. What you call a defect was actually quite intentional. I was working with a shallow depth of field to separate my subject from the background and with a relatively low shutter speed to capture the movement of the wings. There was very little PS post processing in this image and I fail to see the banding on my screen. I think that your rendition is a good alternative but it lacks the dynamic pulse that I was aiming for.