The accommodating Comma

click photo to enlarge
The Big Butterfly Count is currently underway in  the UK. This year it is running from 20th July to 11th August. An annual event organised by Butterfly Conservation, it enlists volunteers to count the species and number of butterflies on a bright or sunny day, in any location, over a period of 15 minutes. Results are collected and collated and help to give a picture of the relative health of the country's butterfly populations.

I recently consulted last year's results to find out the status of the Comma that I'd been photographing, at my wife's request, in our garden. Last year's wet summer produced somewhat atypical results with the Meadow Brown the runaway winner in terms of numbers. The commonest butterflies in my garden this year are (with last year's placings in brackets) Small White (4), Large White (5), Peacock (16), Red Admiral (11) and Small Tortoiseshell (10). However, we see several more including the Brimstone, Wall, Painted Lady and others. The Comma also turns up now and again. Last year it was the 12th commonest species nationwide.

The Comma is named after the small white comma-like mark on the underside of its wings. It's an attractive butterfly with its orange and black markings and ragged edged wings. A characteristic that endears it to me as a photographer is the fact that it scares much less easily than, say, Peacocks and Red Admirals, when the camera lens approaches it. I took today's shot with a 100mm macro lens that had a hood mounted on the end of it. The butterfly tolerated the edge of the hood a matter of 10 centimetres or less from it, and that when the camera was mounted on a bright silver tripod. A very accommodating butterfly in that respect.

Less accommodating in its choice of flowers however. A bright orange Comma butterfly on a pink and orange Coneflower (Echinacea) with green leaves in the background makes for an eye-watering colour combination. They would become my number one butterfly in all respects if they'd feed on one of our dusky blue flowers so I could compose photographs with colours more to my liking!

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off

In praise of blur

click photo to enlarge

I've said elsewhere in this blog that the technical and technological side of photography doesn't interest me very much. In fact, I engage in it only to the extent that I have to in order to make the photographs that I require. The truth is that I pursue photography because I like making pictures.

I do, however, occasionally visit photography forums and one thing I have gleaned in my surfing is the extent to which many photographers value sharpness above all other qualities in a camera/lens combination. Consequently lens acuity as measured in lines per millimetre seem to be very important to many. Questions about new lenses or lenses that someone is considering buying often solicit forum members' evidence of sharpness. Colour rendition, bokeh, contrast, flare handling and all the other qualities that are desirable in a lens come well down the list of sought after features - if they are considered at all. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate a sharp lens, and I also understand that a sharp lens can be manipulated to lose some of its sharpness whereas a lens that isn't very sharp is difficult to sharpen. But, sharpness isn't everything, and some subjects are the worse for it. Moreover, using your lens in ways other than to secure maximum detail is often the right thing to do.

I was thinking about this when I photographed a bed of coneflowers the other day. I took a shot of the blooms aiming for sharp examples in the foreground and blurred heads behind. But, as I looked through the viewfinder I found I preferred the out of focus flowers to the sharp examples. So I took a few shots, some that resolved great detail, and others - like the one above - where nothing was sharp. Out of all the images that I gathered it was the out of focus ones that I preferred for their hazy, indistinct, painterly qualities.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 300mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 1250
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On