Sun-light & Flash-light – my two brushes for these shots.

Great technique for delicate, translucent subjects like butterflies. The combination of strong sunlight behind and flash in front, balanced well, brings out details impossible to see in flat light.

Shooting hand-held close-up’s with super-telephoto lenses poses particular challenges. These are taken at 900mm focal length so shutter speeds immediately take you into the realm of High Speed Sync Flash (HSS), a realm where the art supersedes the science. I shoot always hand-held & in Manual mode – setting shutter speed and aperture with ISO floating for correct exposure. Add in high speed sync flash and you have a set of variables that can really bring these delicate subjects alive.

With camera set to meter correctly for the background and shooting into the sun, the HSS flash does it’s standard job of fill flash for the shadows but still allowing the translucence of the wings to show – flash picks out the cobwebs too.

The image below draws on underexposing the flash -3EV so most of the detail is actually from sunlight shining through the wings with the flash just lifting the shadows: still HSS flash as 1/400s shutter speed is higher than camera sync. This is generally below the minimum I can hand-hold the lens

• 

The final image uses a different mix of these variables to isolate the butterfly from its background. Camera set to underexpose for the background by 2 stops. Sunlight is actually from the left so flash spot-metered on the wings. The loss of detail in the background due to lighting allowed me to shoot at f11 for better depth of field but still keep the ISO low to preserve the detail of the scales in this 300% cropped image.

“Photography is all about painting in light”

•