Butterflies can make for great images, but they’re not the most co-operative of subjects: have you ever tried to get one to sign a model release form?

Last summer I spent a merry, if sometimes frustrating, couple of hours on a sunny afternoon trying to get some worthwhile photographs of the butterflies that were feasting on one of our buddleias. Obviously, I was using my longest lens, but as that\s only 200mm I couldn’t get as close as I might have wished.

Before

As it stands, this isn’t much of a photograph but there was the germ of something more interesting in there, although it needed a fair bit of post-processing to tease it out.

After

The first step was to crop out most of the background. Once I’d focused in on the butterfly it seemed clear that rotating the image would make it more arresting and give a more pleasing composition. I also flipped it so that the butterfly was facing upwards.

After that, it was a matter of adjusting various sliders to give more ‘punch’ not only to the overall image but also the individual colours, where I altered Luminance rather than Hue. A final touch of Sharpening and there you have it.

ABFriday 12 February 2016