Category: photography

if it’s just about the photography experience

Mid-Flight Photography

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Butterfly in flight.

Pics of mid-flight butterflies are challenging, but doable.

1) Determine flight patterns and focus in those areas.
2) Use a focal length with a little forgiveness (200mm @f8)
3) Use a pull-focus limiter and practice at different lengths. https://www.focusshifter.com/
3a) Limit your focus pulls to a small area.
4) Learn to aim your lens without the EV or monitor. (Practice)
5) Always know where you are focused as a starting point.
6) Go!

As much as I like these in-focus pieces, I found that allowing impressions (sometimes just a “miss”) can be just as satisfying.

This has been my summer project, and it has helped me re-hone my muscle memory for manual focus. It has also created another story that happened while I was practicing. That is coming up next.

This technique works very well and I ended up with a plethora of usable pieces. Here are a few.

AMBUSH

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Nature teaches us
Suspect every corner
Something may be waiting

Cover: Flower crab spider waits for his time.

As I traversed the trail up the hill, the remnants of an altercation with one of the quail revealed itself.

Cerveau de Monarque (Monarch Brain)

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It’s not ADHD
OCD
It’s not.
Is it?

Turkey, quail, coyote, lynx, mice, rabbit, deer, fox. They are all around here doing their life. I bring them around. Entice them so I can see them up close. Well, actually, most of them I don’t bring in. They just show up.
I had high hopes with mourning cloak caterpillars. Maybe I could document some of their life cycle. Then they scattered one night. Not to be seen again. Now it’s the monarch butterfly who’s piqued my interest.
We were gifted a milkweed at Christmas and managed not to kill it since then. I was in the middle of completely ignoring it when one afternoon I caught sight of a monarch circling the plant. Grabbed the FX30 and shot some footage and jpgs. The specimen graced the plant with some eggs and now we’re expecting.
Something new to read up on or “youtube” to get to the bottom of rearing the hopeful new grandkids…grandflies?
Anyway, as usual, I really don’t know anything. You start digging and pretty soon it’s all about propagating more milkweed. “You likely don’t have enough or “Watch out for this, be careful of that.”
It’s a rabbit hole alright.
We’ll see what happens next.

The FX30 is not a photo-centric camera, but it does ok. (No viewfinder…oy)

Still, with a little practice:

What I do like about the camera is 240FPS with 4:2:2 color. Float like a butterfly.

Deflated

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Nature has a way
Of promise
Without promising anything

Earlier this spring as I was tending to our landscape irrigation, I noticed some little black dots on the ground under the Chinese elm. Looking up, there to my delight were dozens and dozens of caterpillars grazing on the leaves.

Immediately I started planning to document the life stages in video and photos. I read SOME of the information and started planning. Within a few days, they were gone. Completely, utterly vanished. Searching the property was futile. Stuffing my head into trees and bushes for many days, I must have looked like a weirdo.
The part I did not read said that when the caterpillars fully mature, they drop from the tree and move to another spot to become butterflies. They disband as well so they are not all in one spot.
Maybe next year?
Since then (mid April), I’ve only seen one of the adults and I can’t be sure it was from one of them.

Nymphalis antiopa – (Mourning Cloak)