Beautiful Butterflies

(December 2nd) When selecting a place to go after Thanksgiving, one of the major factors that made me choose south Texas was the butterflies. I've never seen a better place for it, and I was looking forward to spending each afternoon working macro shots with the butterflies. Unfortunately this was the first opportunity I had due to the weather. So I grabbed my macro gear and headed over to the North American Butterfly Association (NABA) International Butterfly Park. This place is amazing and can be full with tons of different of butterfly species. One of the first I shot is a personal favorite of mine, the Gulf Fritillary.

Butterflies have a number of different defenses. Some of them use poisonous chemicals, some mimic eyes of a large creature, and some mimic plants. This Tropical Leafwing is one of the latter. From looking at it like this, you'd never guess that the inner wings are a gorgeous deep red.

One of the common butterflies that can be found on most continents is the Painted Lady. This butterfly is known to migrate, although it does not congegrate in the winter like the well-known Monarch. It is certainly a comely butterfly.

Shooting macro shots is pretty tough. As I mentioned in earlier posts, it is all done with manually focusing and everything is moving a ton, so getting sharp focus and proper depth of field is hard. I was also using some extra fill flash today to even out the light. I had a great time doing it and was mainly trying to use today as an experimental day to perfect my shots on a future day. However within being out there for maybe one and a half hours, a cold front moved in and almost instantly the butterflies vanished, going into their secret hiding places. This cold front would last the rest of my trip, bringing snow to Houston and eliminating any other chance of butterfly photography. I never would have guessed that in a week long trip to south Texas, I'd only have 1.5 hours of butterfly shooting due to rain and cold. The moral of the story is you have to make the best of every chance you get behind the camera - you never know if you'll get the chance again. This skipper was one of my last subects before the cold arrived.