Butterfly on a Flower

[Scottes]

Taken at a local butterfly house. Orange Banded Butterfly on a Purple Flower.
My best guess at the flower is Periwinkle. Anyone with a better ID?

http://www.itsanadventure.com/postimages/OrangeBandedOnPurpleFlower.jpg

While working this in Photoshop I decided to check the Gamut Warning, and was fairly amazed to find that at least 60% of the image was out of gamut in AdobeRGB, let alone sRGB. So I played with hue and saturation a bit, proofing colors and such. Does it look OK? Any comments as to the photography are welcome, too.

[Belmondo]

Does it look OK?

You're kidding, right? It looks great. A fine effort. I sure wouldn't be too concerned about the numbers of photos you took. To get one this good is worth a day's trouble.

[G3]

Well done, Scottes. Very nice image.

[Scottes]

Does it look OK?

You're kidding, right? It looks great. A fine effort. I sure wouldn't be too concerned about the numbers of photos you took. To get one this good is worth a day's trouble.

I understand your answer from the other message, but what I meant here was: Are the colors OK? Did I over-saturate or shift the hue too much? Did I over-sharpen? Does it need more or less contrast? These are things I can't see.

As well as, I guess, is the composition OK? Does the blob of bud on the lower left disturb you too much? How about the orange behind the flower? Or the stem coming out of the top left petals? Is the background too much of a mix of dark and green? Does the slight OoF on the top right petal bother you? Or the glare of flash on the bottom wings?

These are things I see, that I nit-pick on myself. But did you notice any of them? Did they bother, disturb, or distract you? And now that I've pointed them out do they?

The above is NOT meant to be a nit-picking exercise, but rather to discover what I can get away with. At what point does some imperfection become a distraction?

Nature is rarely going to hand any of us a perfect image. Knowing the limits of imperfection better will help me towards the goal of capturing a pleasing image.

[Idoc]

Most of the time I can find something to dislike or improve but not this time.

Color = Perfect (Gamut does wonders :D )
Composition = Perfect

I need not go on.

This one is a keeper! 8)


Had to edit this after your new post:

Saturation is a bit much on the butterfly, the bulb/bud to the left is slighlty distracting (nothing to be too worried about), the stem coming from the top of the flower didn't bother me until you mentioned it but does add some linear element that works with the composition. Now compostion wise I love it.

[Conk]

I'd have to say that the shot is great. Color, dof, you name it. I have a similar shot of the same butterfly and had a difficult time with the orange and reds as they are so brilliant.
http://www.pbase.com/image/19916727.jpg

[Bunzo]

Scottes - Great picture!

The flash or whatever on the butterfly makes his wings look shiney. Being that I take lots of butterfly pictures myself, this caught my eye as being unnatural. That particular Heliconian has no shine. You picked up the colors very well though.

[Scottes]

The flash or whatever on the butterfly makes his wings look shiney. Being that I take lots of butterfly pictures myself, this caught my eye as being unnatural. That particular Heliconian has no shine.

You know, I thought it was flash, too. But I took 8 or 9 pictures of this guys trying to get the composition right - the 10D's less-than-100% viewfinder makes this tough sometimes. But in every picture that little whiteness is there and identical in every one - no matter what angle I held the camera at.

The flash is a 420EX with a Lumiquest Ultrasoft at FEC -1. I highly doubt that this amount of diffusion could produce shine like that on anything other than a very shiny object. Out of 100+ flashed pictures I had a couple with any type of glare. Here's one:

http://www.itsanadventure.com/postimages/butterflyglare.jpg

Notice how soft the glare is. It's pretty diffused. And that's at -0.6 FEC. And he's a fairly shiny butterfly.

I'm not trying to defend myself here - but that whiteness bothered me because I thought it was flash, so I spent about 20 minutes checking things. When I look at everything else I'm convinced that this is not flash glare. But when I look at the photo on it's own even I'm still not convinced. And you're the second person to point it out.

:(


Ahhhhh, ya know what? It's *still* a decent picture. :lol:

[jim monroe]

Since you're asking to be super critical which I believe is the best way to improve let me say first the shot is clearly a nice shot however not one of those very rare exceptional shots.
I think the colors is great so for me no problems there. For my own education I would have like to see a before and after to see what you did.
I do think the bud bulb to the left of the flower distracts slightly and to a lesser degree the stem.
Probably what first caught my eye as a slight negative but nevertheless a concern for that exceptional shot is that the butterfly seems to have some of its scales rubbed off giving what might be called blemishes to it on the lower wings. Like I think you said nature is seldom perfect but we strive in that direction.
I have had a lot of concern about less than premier subjects in my own nature photography especially with Great Blue Herons. First I'm lucky to even see one and then I have yet to see one, much less photograph it, with that fantastic plummage that some of them have.
Hope this is useful. Again all the above are nits but I suspect like me you want to eliminate them.

[Bunzo]

You know, I thought it was flash, too. But I took 8 or 9 pictures of this guys trying to get the composition right - the 10D's less-than-100% viewfinder makes this tough sometimes. But in every picture that little whiteness is there and identical in every one - no matter what angle I held the camera at.

I do like the picture but stay with the statement that whatever is on the butterfly, it takes away from the overall picture.

[Scottes]

I do like the picture but stay with the statement that whatever is on the butterfly, it takes away from the overall picture.

I have to agree.

[jim monroe]

Like I said in my above note I think it is not what is on the butterflies wings but what is not on them. As butterflies age and their wings rub against things they lose some of the scales which make up the coloring. I notice this especially on Monarchs in the late summer.
Scottes if I understand you correctly I am not surprised that trying different angles had no effect it was just part of natural wear and tear on the butterfly. In fact due to the location it may be loss of color due to this butterflies hind wings rubbing against each other.

[Scottes]

For my own education I would have like to see a before and after to see what you did.

Before: (Ie; straight from camera, no adjustments other than size)

http://www.itsanadventure.com/postimages/OrangeBandedOnPurpleFlowerUntouched.jpg

After: (Same as above, but easier to compare side by side)
http://www.itsanadventure.com/postimages/OrangeBandedOnPurpleFlower.jpg

The contrast adjustment does wonders, of course. Here's the original Histogram to show that this was a fairly huge difference.
http://www.itsanadventure.com/postimages/OrangeBandedHistogram.gif
I pushed the shadows to about midway up the small slope - I wanted the black in the background to be fairly dark, and it certainly didn't hurt the black of the butetrfly.

The sharpening helped but I didn't really push that because I always had a tendency to over-sharpen and I'm trying to watch it. I can't equate this sharpening level in PS terms because I use the Fred Miranda Intellisharpen plugin. This is level 2, out of 15, so it's pretty mild.

But for the colors it's not a whole lot of difference really, just a slight shift to punch them up. The "after" looks much more colorful but the contrast adjustment does about half the work. This is probably equivalent to pushing saturation about 1.5% or 2%, but I didn't like the straight saturation increase because it really made the orange look gaudy and it glowed. So I had to hand-tweak some, basically pushing Green and Blue about 2%, but Red only 1%.

[jim monroe]

Nice example of post-processing improvements.
In some sense the adjustments are small but they have a significant impact as can be seen by comparing the two. The colors on the butterfly look just right to me. Not overdone which can sometimes be the case. I remember an extreme case of a flamingo picture posted some time back where a color adjustment had been made and the flamingo looked almost like a neon sign.