Some photos at a butterfly farm

I love looking at other people's photos of butterflies.
Many of those are taken "in the wild", which is challenging!

I sometimes photograph butterflies in the wild, but I took these at a butterfly farm.
Less challenging, but more opportunities for composition.

Stratford-upon-Avon Butterfly Farm:
https://www.butterflyfarm.co.uk/attraction/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratford_Butterfly_Farm

I took about 800 photos, (single-shot, not burst mode), over about 4 hours.
My shortlist comprises 52 photos; those are now all JPEGs on my PC.
Here are 10 of them; I expect to post more of them in future.

All were processed in Lightroom Classic. None in Photoshop.
(I would process them further in Photoshop for printing, competitions, or exhibitions).

All of these were cropped in Lightroom; the metadata in gallery-mode indicates how much. Given that the K-1-series has 36mp, it can be seen that some of these were cropped to about APSC size.

All of these were taken with the lovely Pentax 28-105mm FF lens.
I think this lens would be an attractive "a bit longer than normal" zoom on the K-New.
I'm certain that the resultant image quality would be excellent.

(I used to use the Pentax 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens, but without a limiter it often hunted).

Beautiful series Barry! All very sharp, all at 105mm(what lens). At 3200 ISO did you have to do any clean-up?

Thanks for the beautiful butterfly shots,

Tom W

Lothman wrote:

Barry Pearson wrote:

the 100% view is totally disappointing, at that size one should easily see the scales but everything is smeared.

@Lothman: That's called post processing and noise reduction because this is an ISO3200 picture of a butterfly. The post you made below your first comment, with the link, is to a sample of an ISO100 picture of a butterfly. Not apples to apples at all.

TomWret wrote:

Beautiful series Barry! All very sharp, all at 105mm(what lens).

HD PENTAX-D FA 28-105mm F3.5-5.6 ED DC WR

My review: Review of the D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-f/5.6 lens

At 3200 ISO did you have to do any clean-up?

Some background:

The lighting inside a butterfly farm is designed for the comfort of the occupants, (which are not just butterflies), and for the safety of the visitors.

Human visitors have to adapt to the lighting.
Photographers have to put-up with those conditions and do what they can.
(After their equipment has un-misted from the effects of the warm humid atmosphere).

I would have preferred greater depth of field.
I rejected many photos because I couldn't get both antennae and the head in focus.

I would have preferred a faster shutter speed because they kept moving!

So I ended up with ISOs from 3200 to 9000.

As always in low lighting, I spent time in the "Detail" panel of Lightroom Classic.
I juggle three main sliders:

• Luminance Noise Reduction - to reduce high-ISO noise
• Sharpening Masking - to try to ensure that I don't sharpen remaining noise
• Sharpening Amount - as close to maximum as I can, given the other two sliders

(For some eventual destinations I would then do more in Photoshop.
In this case I didn't)

Thanks for the beautiful butterfly shots,

Thanks!

Nice series, I went there many years ago and have been meaning to get back there.

Some good shots there Barry.

Caseylou wrote:

Fantastic collection. You sure do get some incredible color.

Thanks!

For the record, the colour came from the butterflies themselves and the Pentax K-1ii.
I didn't need to "enhance" the colour in any way.