BUTTERFLIES, WHAT A STRANGE NAME!

Such beautiful and fragile creatures deserves a beautiful name: fjärill (Swedish), papillon (French), perhonen (Finish), mariposa (Spanish), farfalla (Italian), schmetterling (German) ... the most beautiful I know of is the Danish sommerfugl (Summer-bird). But what about English? Butterfly? Flies are not on the same map in my opinion...more uggly than beauty...and I've never seen any summerfugl eat butter! But this blog is in English, so I will have to do with butterfly.

I've always admired the photographers who are able to produce artistic pictures of flying bugs, not only documenting the specie etc. It is hard enough to catch them in the finder, more so to get them inside the DOF, then you need to think about where the DOF start and end and what more that is inside it, what is behind the DOF in the bokeh, to think about composition, when the bug is flying here and there. Luckily many of them are preoccupied by some flowers or similar, which helps, but it's not easy. It appears to me, with my limited experience, that the most difficult bugs to shoot flying is dragonflies and their different cousins. Ohh, so nervous, manoeuvring like helicopters on steroids. Second position is occupied by butterflies. Even more nervous than the dragonflies, not so good on aeronautics, flying like if they were affected by Brownian diffusion. Worked with the laptop in our garden today, and on the nearby daises several butterflies landed repeatedly, but each time I stood up and reached for the camera, they left like frightened rabbits...

...but a while ago I cheated...
Butterfly wings have two sides that may look very different.

Not so bad...

Quite OK...

I know, far too busy background, but there were no alternaitve...or were there?

Dam grass straw!

How did I cheat? I went to the Butterfly-house in the Haga park in Stockholm with my kids and my mother. After an hour in the heat and high humidity, we were soaked and the SD card was full. Those butterflies are much bigger than the local wild species and they are so used to tourists that they doesn't care that very much about me and my lens.