Send ’em in, please, or we’ll be empty over the holiday season.
Today’s photos of butterflies come from Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistics professor at Oklahoma State University. Pratyay’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Pratyay and his wife Sreemala have a big bird-and-butterfly website called Wingmates.
Here are various other butterflies photographed in Oklahoma, most of them at our backyard.
Gulf Fritillary (Dione vanillae) eyeing a flower to land on, but it was already occupied by a skipper:
Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) taking off from a cosmos:
Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia) on cosmos. These plants are hardy and attract many pollinators:
Another commoner in our area – American Lady (Vanessa virginiensis):
Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui), looks very similar to the American Lady, but one can spot the difference if they look carefully. They have the widest distribution of any butterfly, found on all continents except Antarctica and Australia:
Another Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) on our cosmos. Mid-day harsh light is terrible for bird photography, but it can be worked around when photographing butterflies. In fact, I quite like the glow that comes from the sun hitting the butterflies from directly above:
Closeup of a Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui). They have a long “nose” (actually, elongated mouthpart), but can’t beat the American Snout (Libytheana carinenta) in this regard:
The next two images are for the readers to guess which one is an American Lady and which is a Painted Lady. Can you tell what this one is?:
What kind of Lady is this?:
Monarch (Danaus plexippus):
Viceroys (Limenitis archippus) look similar to Monarch, but they are smaller and have a black line across the hindwing that the Monarch doesn’t. They were thought to be a Batesian mimic of Monarch for a long time, but are now considered a Mullerian mimic where both species are unappealing to predators and evolve similar appearances, reinforcing predators’ avoidance of either one:
Not all butterflies visit flowers. This Question Mark butterfly (Polygonia interrogationis), for example, only visits flowers when its usual food sources – rotting fruit, plant sap, dung etc., are not easily available:
Tawny Emperors (Asterocampa clyton) have a similar diet:
Hackberry Emperor (Asterocampa celtis), another similar butterfly from the same family. They are quite common in our area:
Northern Pearly-eye (Lethe anthedon). We don’t see this one very often:
Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa), one of the most uniquely beautiful butterflies that we see here:
Wow these are gorgeous!
The “Monarch” one though – woooo, that is an incredibly strong composition, could easily be a large-format artwork on a wall … or two or three 😁!
I mean, the wings appear to be hand-painted on an artsy canvas – but it’s real! Intriguing contrast! And I can feel the three-dimensional nature of plant .. a sort of mental 3D illusion piece of art…
These photos are beautifully artistic and technically excellent. Please share the technical details about how you took these photos. I’d love to learn!
Thank you very much! Instead of posting the EXIF for each image, here are some general details that I hope are useful:
I take almost all my photos using Canon R5 + Canon RF 100-500. My to-go focal length is 500mm and the default f-stop is f/7.1 (that’s the widest the lens can go at 500mm). However, for butterflies in action, I tend to close it down a bit more (typically f/9, sometimes up to f/11) just to make sure the movement of the butterfly does not take it out of focus. It still takes incredible patience and some amount of luck. Much tougher than birds in action IMO. Knowing the behavior of the insect (likely to come back to the same perch vs move to the next flower in a certain direction) can definitely help. Over time, I have been able to guess what the most attractive flowers in the garden are on a certain day.
Since aperture is relatively narrow, and therefore, the depth of field is quite deep, I try to stay low and choose a background that is very far away, or I would not be able to get the separation of the subject from the background. For still subjects, I have sometimes used focus stacking to get all parts of the body in focus, but it’s usually too much work for me especially since I don’t typically carry a tripod. Saying that, when I carry my tripod (with a gimbal head), it does help a lot for action shots. This may sound counter-intuitive, but waiting on a critter to take off while pointing the heavy camera+lens at it, sometimes for several minutes, is not fun.
Obviously, the shutter speed needs to be quite high for action shots. My to-go for butterflies is 1/3200s or higher if possible. Bigger and slower butterflies like Monarch can be handled with slightly less speed, but most of them are quite fast. For one species of hummingbird moth, I could not freeze the wings fully even at 1/8000s! A high shutter speed and a relatively narrow aperture means the ISO would need to be on the higher side. Thanks to the newer camera technologies, now we can easily use ISO up to 3200 without any problem and I often go up to 6400 if necessary. I try to avoid higher than 6400, since although one can still clean up the noise using modern software, the colors and the details are not as accurate if I go too extreme.
In summary, a typical exposure would look like 500mm f/9 1/3200s ISO3200. Of course this is dependent on available light. When available light is low, it is almost always better to use a higher ISO and expose to the right rather than pulling the exposure up in post processing. This is counter-intuitive to some, but the technical reasons for this are well studied. My post processing overflow is pretty typical using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop (and sometimes using DXO Pureraw for noise removal). I like to learn new image processing concepts since I also find them mathematically quite interesting.
Perfect. This is exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you!
Beautiful creatures. Beautiful compositions. Thank you!
These are wonderful!
Your pictures are beautifully balanced, and works of art—aside from their reference value.
#2 looks painted, leaving #1 as American?
Vanessa cardui is very common in my garden and the day we get Vanessa virginiensis in the UK I will be straight on the phone to butterfly conservation! It can’t be impossible, we get immigrant Mourning Cloaks, we just named them Camberwell Beauty, probably in ignorance of their origins; I last saw one over 50 years ago in my northern location.
UK is actually within the range of Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa); so, it would not necessarily be an “immigrant”. Camberwell beauty is indeed the common name there.
Actually, #1 is Painted. They do look quite similar.
#1 was my original thought and then I doubted myself and was swayed by the underwing markings…. should have quit whilst I was ahead! I am sure I could determine the diagnostic markers if I had specimens side by side, obviously that isn’t going to happen, :->
As to the Camberwell Beauty, I always remember it being described as an immigrant species and checking on butterfly conservation it would appear to still be so, though it describes their origins as being Eurasia. Wherever it originates, it is a genuine shame that the species never established a breeding colony over here. I just realised that I am considerably older than I thought, I actually saw one in 1967 and never saw another. I refrained from collecting it because my book said it was uncommon in the UK, so I left it for someone else to see and hopefully not collect so others could see it.
These are beautiful creatures, beautifully photographed. The light is especially well treated.
Thank you so much for these gorgeous photos! I hope there will be more….
What is the plant the monarch is on? It is also intriguing.
Wonderful! Magical!!
The story about the confusion over Viceroy butterflies (as I was told, anyway), was that during the original research on their toxicity, the researcher raised caterpillars on a non-preferred host plant, and they grew up to be non-toxic. It was only after a long time that this was re-tested, using their usual host plant which are members of the Willow family.
Thanks! Yes, that matches with what I had read. The latter experiment was done with birds offered the butterflies without their wings and the birds apparently found both species equally distasteful.
Thank you, everyone.
Here’s the answer for the Painted-American Lady quiz:
#1 – Painted, #2 – American.
One way to tell them apart is the tiny white dot on orange at the upper part of their wings which is present in American Ladies, but not in Painted. If you can see the Ventral side of the wing, American has two eyespots and Painted has four.
Thank you for your pictures. The Pearly-eye butterfly is gorgeous! The peacock of the butterfly world.
Beautiful color and composition.
THAT is one great batch… thanks for posting.
Ooh, lovely!
There is a T-shirt out there with a Monarch on it that reads something like: “This country only needs one Monarch and it is a butterfly.”
Super!
I have been interested in butterflies all my life, but never before have I seen such good butterfly photos. Thank you!
Amazing!!
Superb pictures. Thanks!
Wow! What a stunning set of photos.