{"id":1455,"date":"2009-10-06T22:28:24","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T22:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/?p=1455"},"modified":"2014-08-07T19:52:15","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T19:52:15","slug":"photo-of-the-week-75-small-tortoiseshell-butterfly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/2009\/10\/06\/photo-of-the-week-75-small-tortoiseshell-butterfly\/","title":{"rendered":"Photo of the Week 85 &#8211; Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is one of my favourite butterfly shots of the year. The season&#8217;s pretty much over now, so the changes are this will remain my favourite form the year. For a start, I think the Small Tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) is one of the nicest species we have in Ireland, but this shot also illustrates why I love my Nikkor 55-200mm F3.5-5.6 zoom lens very well. When you&#8217;re shooting flowers or butterflies, you want the subject to be in sharp focus, and the background to be out of focus so that it doesn&#8217;t distract from the subject. You don&#8217;t want a busy complex background competing for the viewer&#8217;s eye. It&#8217;s that blurry background that gives shots that pro feel, sometimes called &#8216;the magazine look&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>This lens allows for a really shallow depth of field right in the sweet spot of the lens (around f8), and gives a wonderfully smooth and creamy bokeh (the out of focus areas). As lenses go, this is a cheap lens, I paid less than &euro;300 for it a few years ago, and it&#8217;s come down in price since. A great value lens of you&#8217;re a Nikon DX shooter. There&#8217;s a new fancy VR (vibration reduction) version of this lens too, but TBH, I think VR is over-kill on this lens. If you can afford it, great, but I certainly don&#8217;t miss it. This is my work-horse lens, and I love it to bits.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/DSC_1363.jpg\" alt=\"Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly\" style=\"border-width:0px;\" width=\"340\" height=\"450\" \/><br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/bbusschots\/3954729144\/\" target=\"_blank\">on Flickr<\/a> &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/bbusschots\/3954729144\/sizes\/o\/\" target=\"_blank\">Full-Size<\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Camera:<\/strong> Nikon D40<\/li>\n<li><strong>Lens:<\/strong> Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm<\/li>\n<li><strong>Exposure:<\/strong> 1\/800 sec<\/li>\n<li><strong>Focal Length:<\/strong> 200mm<\/li>\n<li><strong>Focal Ratio:<\/strong> <em>f<\/em>\/11<\/li>\n<li><strong>ISO:<\/strong> 400<\/li>\n<li><strong>Camera Mode:<\/strong> Aperture Priority<\/li>\n<li><strong>Exposure Bias:<\/strong> -0.7ev<\/li>\n<li><strong>Processing:<\/strong> This shot is pretty much as it came out of the camera. It has been cropped to improve the composition, and subtly tweaked in Aperture&#8217;s Dodge &#038; Burn plugin to selectively improve the contrast on the butterfly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is one of my favourite butterfly shots of the year. The season&#8217;s pretty much over now, so the changes are this will remain my favourite form the year. For a start, I think the Small Tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) is one of the nicest species we have in Ireland, but this shot also illustrates why [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22],"tags":[517,31,35,229,34,28,90],"series":[],"class_list":["post-1455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","tag-butterfly","tag-ireland","tag-kildare","tag-macro","tag-maynooth","tag-photo-of-the-week","tag-spcm"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7t9xK-nt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1455"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8089,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions\/8089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1455"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=1455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}