Reader Tom Hennessy sent some nice macro photos of plants and butterflies. No IDs were provided, so if you can identify either the plants or the lepidopterans, please do so below.
. . . Since my oldest daughter lives in Chicago, I get the chance to visit occasionally. (I live near Richmond, VA) I try to get time in the Chicago Botanic Gardens when I can, and I am attaching a few butterfly and flower photos I took there and in Lewis Ginter Botanic Gardens. Since my wife and I are members of the Lewis Ginter Botanic Gardens in Richmond, we get reciprocal admission to the Chicago Gardens. Both are very nice venues and I take a lot of macro photos at both gardens. I hope you like them.
Picture #3: Bletilla orchid?
Yes, Bletilla striata I think. Commonly cultivated because relatively easy to grow for an orchid. No greenhouse required in many places.
The first two images are flowers of a male plant of some species of Thalictrum (meadow rue, family Ranunculaceae).
What a beautiful start to the day!
Beautiful, all!
And sub
Beautiful shots Tom!
Those are weird looking birds!! Just like flowers! 😉 Jerry – I think you meant to say “plants and butterflies”.
Nice photos though!
Fixed, thanks.
I think the one on the magenta flowers is Pipevine Swallowtail.
The others seem to be exotics from the tropics.
And the 2nd butterfly is the pipevine swallowtail (Battus philenor. These are real beauties of the southern U.S. The pipevine host plant makes them toxic, so they display warning colors. They are thought to be mimicked by a variety of other butterflies, including other swallowtails — Batesian mimicry as far as I know.
Wow, those are spectacular photographs.
Very well done Tom. I get work from professional freelancers on a regular basis that isn’t as good as these photos.
Really spectacular images. Inspired me to read two papers on butterfly evodevo: the extreme closeup shook my lack of faith. Very relieved to find there is a natural explanation for the apparent artistry.
The close-up of the black and white striped butterfly is from Indonesia, or thereabouts: Idea blanchardi, or something very close to that. They are commonly known as ‘paper butterflies’.
One can see this is in the Danaidae family, the same family as the ubiquitous monarch butterfly. A characteristic of this family is that they have vestigial front legs, so that they are functionally 4-legged insects. You can see the small, useless pair of legs pinned up on its chest. I simply did a search of images for this family, and the matching butterfly came right up.
Thank you for your kind comments. I have always enjoyed macro photography and I like to take close up photos of flowers, often to the point of appearing as abstract forms. Having access to good botanic gardens helps. In Richmond, the Lewis Ginter Botanic garden has a large conservatory, so I can photograph year round. Lately I have been taking photos of some beautiful orchids.
Macro photography is a blast. Very nice photos- you have a good eye.
Great photos Tom. I also like to do macrophotography of flowers and insects but am not up to your level. I visited the LGBG a few years ago, when they had a butterfly exhibition in the conservatory. Coincidentally, we were visiting my nephew who lives in Richmond and who soon will move to Chicago.
My scheme is to get a good digital camera body as an early birthday present to myself and use a reversing ring to attach the various lenses I have from my fathers’ old 35 mm camera. Then I might join the macro-club.
Mark; If you buy a digital camera kit it will typically come with one or two general purpose zoom lenses. Then you can get inexpensive extension tubes that fit between the lens and camera body. This increases the magnification that you can get from the lenses and is a very good way to start doing macro work. In the longer run, a good macro lens is a great investment. I use a Canon 100 mm macro lens which is excellent, and is also a good portrait lens.
I already have the lenses, and they are EF lenses that will work with the new cameras (I am told). The extension tubes are a good idea, and I will look into that. Reversing rings are cheap enuf that I will still want to play with those as well.
I figure if I mainly go for the body, sans additional lenses, I can get a real nice body. I think I have 4 or 5 different ones, including a whopping telephoto lens. My dad would buy expensive things and never use them.
Some cameras will not work without a lens attached normally, i.e. they need to have electronic connection to the lens. I think some reversing setups have the connections to work with these cameras but others don’t, so you need to make sure you won’t have this problem. Also you need a way to change the aperture on the lens, probably not a problem with older lenses.
I used a reversed 50 mm lens for macro when I started photography; it produced good quality photos (or at least I thought so at the time) but I had to be quite close to the subject. Simple lenses, which move the whole assembly in and out to focus rather than having internal focus or other complicated systems, will probably work the best. Another option is close-up lenses that attach to the front of a lens; I think Canon still makes some good ones. You also can mount a reversed normal or wide angle lens to the front of a telephoto lens but I never had much luck with that. I now use dedicated macro lenses like Tom.
These are interesting ideas. As it happens, the set-up I am looking is for Canon equipment. I know that I will need to manually focus with a reversed lens. With digital cameras I feel I can shoot away, experimenting w/ different apertures.
I did not know about attaching additional close-up lenses, and that is something I need to look for. I was thinking extension tubes (lately).
This is fun! And I have not even bought anything yet.
My macro lens is a Sigma that I find is quite nice the 105mm f/2.8 EX DG with a Canon mount. Just to give you an option for non-Canon lenses – there are some nice ones.
I think Canon EF lenses use electronic aperture, so to reverse mount one you definitely need some kind of connection between camera and the back of the lens (which is now at the front). I think Canon makes such a device. You focus reversed lenses by moving the whole setup closer to/farther from your subject — the lens’ focus mechanism just moves the mount (now at the front) in and out.
OK, someone else gets to identify the remaining butterflies. Here is a hint: the close-up picture with the eye spots is a large butterfly that a lot of you know, and is seen in South American jungles. This one will be easy to ID to species.
The last one has me stumped so far, but I think it belongs to the ‘skipper’ family, Hesperiidae.
I don’t know the identity of the last butterfly, but I also took some photos of an identical one which is blue in color. These were in the butterfly exhibit in the Chicago Botanic gardens in 2013.
The butterfly houses will generally issue a brochure to help identify things, but I find that there are always some flying around that are not in the brochure.
Found it! Parthenos sylvia philippensis. I had to pull out all the stops to id that sucker. Fortunately I am a little obsessive compulsive…
“Here is a hint: the close-up picture with the eye spots is a large butterfly that a lot of you know, and is seen in South American jungles.”
Aha! Morpho peleides
About 10 years ago my son & I returned at night to our cabin in Costa Rica and found one “stuck” (i.e., not stumbling upon one of the many openings it could have gotten through) inside. When it continued batting against the ceiling we worried it would injure itself or a predator would find it before morning, so my son climbed on his bunk and carefully caught it. We had great looks before we released it.
The photo of the bi-color, formal-decorative dahlia is FRESH!
Stunning shots, Tom, thanks so much for sharing!
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Some excellent pics of beautiful butterflies !!