www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

If its a secret Ian, its a secret that your privy to, as you have done it in your competition entry

Regards Gruditch

Yes Sir, I can Bokeh:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xj59w_ ... ogie_music

Well, nearly!

Jack

The only real secret is to find the butterflies that are settled with a decent bit of separation between them and the background - early morning roosting is the easiest and has best light generally - evening is OK too but your timeframe is much shorter. Head out on the downs for example and you'll find hundreds of blues settled at the top of grass stems with nothing obtrusive in the background at all so just take your pick!

Get in close to fill the frame with the subject rather than take a photo from far away and crop down. You end up with a much cleaner background then. Macro lenses are designed for this reason Telephoto or wide angle lenses won't be so effective. It's always a balance between depth of field and background detail so alter the aperture for the desired effect.

This kind of stuff is in most books on macro photography I'd think. I must confess I've not read one for years but it's pretty basic stuff I think.

Regards Marek's comment on Bokeh, you just have to hope you have a nice background to start with. If it's just plain green your only ever going to get plain green. If it's not then the aperture adjustment will give varying degrees of background blur and you can play around to get the result you want there too. I've always found that backgrounds on the continent are far more interesting for this than in the UK. It's just better over there lol. The colours, the light. I'm not sure what it is but it just works! In the two examples he linked to, the dragonflies are taken from further back than a butterfly normally would be, which naturally gives more background detail, and with good separation between subject and background, which is quite clean, you can get away with bigger apertures (which you need anyway for dragonflies, though the wing tips are OOF on the first one quite well if we're being picky ) to bring in some interesting bokeh in the background without at the same time introducing a mass of mess in with it!

The only real issue I see with William's image is that it was taken at F4 on a 180mm macro lens it looks like so depth of field is tiny and the butterflies aren't fully in the plane of focus. It's a pretty brave attempt for 2 butterflies that need to be perfectly aligned to get them all in focus! Ideally if it were mine I'd like the majority of the plant sharp too whereas it's pretty much all out of focus which is a bit distracting to my eye. I think also it needed to be sharpened after reducing the image size down for the competition which all images require but it's often overlooked and sharp images end up not sharp as a result! Noise isn't an issue at all. I don't see any. It was shot at ISO320 in a canon 40D which is fine.

Gruditch wrote:If its a secret Ian, its a secret that your privy to, as you have done it in your competition entry

Regards Gruditch

Good point!

I took the liberty of applying a bit of sharpening to William's image and fiddled the colours fractionally while I had it open. To be fair once the image is sharpened up (I think just omitted in error after reducing the size) the butterflies are pretty much all in sharp focus as I'm sure was evident on the original full size image.

FISHiEE wrote:The only real secret is to find the butterflies that are settled with a decent bit of separation between them and the background - early morning roosting is the easiest and has best light generally - evening is OK too but your timeframe is much shorter. Head out on the downs for example and you'll find hundreds of blues settled at the top of grass stems with nothing obtrusive in the background at all so just take your pick!

Get in close to fill the frame with the subject rather than take a photo from far away and crop down. You end up with a much cleaner background then. Macro lenses are designed for this reason Telephoto or wide angle lenses won't be so effective. It's always a balance between depth of field and background detail so alter the aperture for the desired effect.

Very helpful advice from John, as always. Many thanks.
Ian

A total of only 21 entries. (Hadn't looked until now).

I have to wonder: have these comps passed their sell-by dates?

Jack

I was thinking the same when the comp closed. But when I looked, spring 2014 had 24 entries, and 2013 had 20.

Regards Gruditch

Why not return to the previous format of all members voting on the entries , although there were, I believe , concerns about some skulduggery with that method?
Why not just invite each member to submit a pre June photo for the spring and a post May photo for the summer with no judging but just so that members can see what has been photographed? Then an annual competition externally judged by a non-member RPS nature photographer. Just a thought!

Many other superb photos on ukb are not entered. So the winners from a mere 20 something entries, although they are no doubt good, might not win if all photos published on ukb were considered. That somewhat devalues the competition.

Which leads to an idea. No formal competition as such but as each photo (in whatever forum) is published, viewers rate it on a scale (eg 1 to 5). Then the highest overall average rating is declared winner, 2nd, 3rd etc, etc. (subject to a minimum* of say 20 people actually giving it a rating).

* Rather in the way that cricket averages require a minimum number of innings to be eligible.

Jack

Seriously, have we got to go through this again. What is your problem with the current judges Ian. Do you think we are being bribed or something No matter who judged this last comp, as long as they had some photographic knowledge, the winner would of been Nigel Kiteley. 2nd and 3rd could possibly be reversed, it was a close call for me. But the top three would almost certainly be the same images. Several images could of made it into 4th and 5th.

Ian Pratt wrote:Why not return to the previous format of all members voting on the entries , although there were, I believe , concerns about some skulduggery with that method?

Yes there was lots of tactical voting, and some pretty despicable cheating going on.

Ian Pratt wrote:Why not just invite each member to submit a pre June photo for the spring and a post May photo for the summer with no judging but just so that members can see what has been photographed?

What's the point that. Bit like a school sports day where every child wins. Or in this case, no one even bothers to run.

Ian Pratt wrote:Then an annual competition externally judged by a non-member RPS nature photographer. Just a thought!

Anyone can get letters after their name with RPS. With them so readily taking your money for giving out their LRPS awards, its almost harder to send your images along, and not get a LRPS. With the amount of bitching that goes on, when people don't get the result that think they deserve, I would imagine any non member brave enough to take on the judging. Will soon see this as a thankless task, and say no thanks nest time.

You been on the sauce Jack

Regards Gruditch

You been on the sauce Jack

Not a drop since Wednesday. Honest.

Jack

Personally I would like the competitions to stay. My only concern is that winning photographs can be more about how professionally they have been photo-shopped rather than the original raw image taken. I'm a traditionalist who believes that the entries should be more about the photographers skill with his/her camera as opposed to the editing software (and I'm not stating that this was the case in the spring entries)

However there is no doubting the quality of all the entries and I do find it un-sporting for some to be labelled rubbish (I loved the Orange Tips personally)

As Confucius once said "Everything has it's beauty, but not everyone sees it".

Regards Kev

Hi Kev,

On the very best images, you would probably be surprised how little post processing needs to be done. If you get it all correct in the field, there is very little to do when you get home. However, if you make a dogs dinner of getting the shot, you will find, no matter how hard you try. You will never turn a pigs ear, into a silk purse.


Regards Gruditch

I always feel a bit sorry for Gary when it comes to judging competitions. He gets heaps full of opposition when all he's done is judge what he believes to be the best of two dozen or so submitted entries.

He clearly knows what he's talking about when it comes to photography as the images on his website will pay testament to. It's not as if it's a bunch of amateurs making the selections.

The top three are always almost exclusively the professionally presented images (usually taken by Kiteleys). No amount of field craft can make any of my images even remotely comparable to these. That's why I don't bother entering.

In truth, we may as well leave things to the half dozen or so individuals who monopolise the awards. The majority of us are avid butterfly enthusiasts who supplement our sightings with images (sometimes quite impressive) of our chosen quarry.

The regular winners of these competitions tend to be photography experts who use butterflies to create an attractive finished product.

Unless we abandon our butterfly specialisation in favour of photography, then we have little chance if any of getting on the podium.

Best to just take it on the chin. That's the way it is.

The regular winners of these competitions tend to be photography experts who use butterflies to create an attractive finished product.

You hit the nail on the head there David. Without doubt they are first class photographers but I cannot recall much in the way of contribution to ukb about butterflies per se.

It may be that ukb is steadily splitting:

1. Those for whom photography is the more important - they collect voucher specimens
2. Those for whom photography is incidental to their love of butterflies

Jack

Your probably just on the wind up as usual Jack, but I'll humour you anyway

To get the kind of pictures that these regular competition winners get, you need a pretty damned good knowledge of butterfly behaviour, habitat etc. UK Butterflies is more than just these forums. The calendar, and greeting cards for instance, would be a pretty sad looking articles without the generous contribution of these guys. When you get threads that develop like this one, its no wonder some people decide not join in on the forums.

Regards Gruditch

Jack Harrison wrote:

The regular winners of these competitions tend to be photography experts who use butterflies to create an attractive finished product.

You hit the nail on the head there David. Without doubt they are first class photographers but I cannot recall much in the way of contribution to ukb about butterflies per se.

It may be that ukb is steadily splitting:

1. Those for whom photography is the more important - they collect voucher specimens
2. Those for whom photography is incidental to their love of butterflies

Jack

This thread is one reason I do not enter the photo comps anymore,I love photographing butterflies just as much as I love watching them without my camera,I also donate more money than most to butterfly conservation (don't tell my wife),I also give my images to the calendar whenever Gary thinks one is worthy,so for YOU to place photographers into voucher specimen collectors is a dam cheek,if your so disgruntled get off your backside at 4am and go out and find a roosting voucher,you may find you get a descent image,

John.

is a dam [sic] cheek,if your [sic] so disgruntled get off your backside at 4am and go out and find a roosting voucher,you may find you get a descent [sic] image

As a 76 year old with limited mobility, need I say more? Well I will.
You have drawn attention (unintentionally no doubt) to my physical limitations; I have drawn attention to your (unintentional no doubt) spelling shortcomings. Touché.

Jack

The regular winners of these competitions tend to be photography experts who use butterflies to create an attractive finished product.

In my case nothing could be further from the truth

The photography is merely an extension of my love of wildlife and butterflies in particular

Adrian