I have a Canon S3 with 500D closeup lens and it does the job for me. I can get A3 quality pictures from it with a little spare for cropping. It has a 12x zoom, flip up lcd screen for overhead/ground level shots. You can shoot in auto-everything mode, or other modes that give you control. You don't n...

Love it. Great shot.

Super detail Dave. As for cropping out the finger, it might be better to clone it out to so as keep a bit of picture in front of the butterfly.

Thanks for the tip.

I've made many mistakes over these but I think the first three are small skippers. The fourth could be essex but is too indistinct to be sure.

October isn't the end of the season. Red admiral, speckled wood, peacock and comma will hang on until then. I also photograph dragonflies, and some of the darter amd hawker species are still around until frosts kill them off. Once that happens then there's still the woodland birds in my local patch ...

That was probably me who gave that advice, and you're right, it works sometimes with some of the basking nymphalidae like commas, peacocks and gatekeepers but I haven't got it to work with the blues. I don't know if this works with SWB, but I noticed that when a male chalkhill finds a female he will...

Willsbridge Mill is one of the Avon Wildlife Trust's sites. About 20 acres astride Siston Brook on the edge of suburbia, it is my local patch. I've never seen any fritillaries at all in the site, and I'm not sure if a mere 20 acres, of which maybe 2/3 is woodland, is capable of supporting them. So I...

Thanks Pete. Weather isn't so good today with showers forecast but tomorrow onwards could be ok. There's a cluster of sites around Cheddar that might be good to look maybe on Wednesday.

I'd like to look for small blue in my area, possibly Black Rock, and according to the flight times chart, there is a small second brood round about this time. Is it worth hunting them out or is the second brood so small as to be insignificant?
Thanks.

Did you take any open-wing pics?

These look like two different individuals to me. I think the top is female, bottom is male, both common blue.

Spotted yesterday 28/07/06. More details in the 'sites' forum.

At my local patch today were common blue and brown argus. A butterfly was smaller than average for a blue and looked brown. After taking several photos I conclusively identified it as a female blue. Look at the shot below, at the inner row of black dots on the underwings. There is a row of four on t...

And further to that comment I noticed that when the competition was sorted and a single chalkhill male was left, he'd flutter around her for a while, then pause for breath as it were. As he paused he'd display open winged to the female, an ideal time to snap an open wing shot. You just get a second ...

Yes I'd noticed that, with chalkhills too. It's quite pronounced. I thought a female chalkhill I saw at first was a common until three male chalkhills began to fuss over her!

Coincidently, here's a pair I took today. Not *quite* to your standard but getting there maybe...

Yep, cracking shots. I don't know whether Pete agrees with me but in my experience, female CBs have more pronounced orange roundels on the forewing undersides, and also tend to be generally browner on the undersides than males. When they get older and a bit shabby then it becomes difficult to tell t...

I'm not a fan of overuse of flash, as although depth of field can be increased the black background is, to me, offputting. This is, I must stress, a personal preference and isn't somehow 'wrong'. Having said that, many of the shots in the set still appear dark to me. The dark appearance of the subje...

I visited Brean Down today looking for grayling and wall brown, and found them both. Also there were good numbers of chalkhill blue plus a solitary dark green fritillary. Brean Down is an impressive outcrop of limestone into the Severn Estuary south of Weston Super Mare. Access is from Brean and alt...