Butterflies of Europe
Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2018 10:47 am
Not sure if this is the right place to post this or but, so please forgive me if it isn't!
Some of you may have heard of my grandfather, the late Basil Yates-Smith, he took photographs of butterflies. He used a Nikon F2 camera with a Nikon 200mm lens suitably strapped to ensure fixed focus and hence the constant scale of 0.315 x life. To ensure maximum depth of field a Multiblitz professional flash with twin heads was used. These were modified by moving the flash tubes further back in the parabolic reflectors to increase light intensity at the close working distance involved 2feet lens. The photographs taken were then transformed into slides and carefully documented. The slides have been scanned in using a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED slide scanner.
Convinced in the mid 1960’s that butterflies could largely disappear from Western Europe in Basil’s lifetime, he resolved to collect for posterity as many pictures of them as time and resources permitted.
For this purpose the images had to be of high quality, in colour and to a fixed scale, if they were to truly inform about the relative size and appearance of the various species, choice of nectar source and other habitat information also made it imperative that each picture should be completely natural and that nets, dark boxes, fridges, sedatives and other forms of control would by definition be completely ruled out.
Practically every image taken has been retained in the collection regardless of its artistic merit. Thereby fulfilling the aim to collect as many pictures as circumstances permitted. The collection has often been used for slide shows and book illustrations.
Some of his pictures can be found in such books as 'Butterflies of Britain and Europe' ISBN: 0-00-220059-7 and 'Complete British Insects' ISBN: 0-00-717966-9 and many other books. But there has never been a book about butterflies that has solely used his pictures. So I've spent a long time putting together a full colour book called 'Butterflies of Europe', I've dedicated this book to Basil. The link below takes you to the book.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-williams/ ... 29757.html
Some of you may have heard of my grandfather, the late Basil Yates-Smith, he took photographs of butterflies. He used a Nikon F2 camera with a Nikon 200mm lens suitably strapped to ensure fixed focus and hence the constant scale of 0.315 x life. To ensure maximum depth of field a Multiblitz professional flash with twin heads was used. These were modified by moving the flash tubes further back in the parabolic reflectors to increase light intensity at the close working distance involved 2feet lens. The photographs taken were then transformed into slides and carefully documented. The slides have been scanned in using a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED slide scanner.
Convinced in the mid 1960’s that butterflies could largely disappear from Western Europe in Basil’s lifetime, he resolved to collect for posterity as many pictures of them as time and resources permitted.
For this purpose the images had to be of high quality, in colour and to a fixed scale, if they were to truly inform about the relative size and appearance of the various species, choice of nectar source and other habitat information also made it imperative that each picture should be completely natural and that nets, dark boxes, fridges, sedatives and other forms of control would by definition be completely ruled out.
Practically every image taken has been retained in the collection regardless of its artistic merit. Thereby fulfilling the aim to collect as many pictures as circumstances permitted. The collection has often been used for slide shows and book illustrations.
Some of his pictures can be found in such books as 'Butterflies of Britain and Europe' ISBN: 0-00-220059-7 and 'Complete British Insects' ISBN: 0-00-717966-9 and many other books. But there has never been a book about butterflies that has solely used his pictures. So I've spent a long time putting together a full colour book called 'Butterflies of Europe', I've dedicated this book to Basil. The link below takes you to the book.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-williams/ ... 29757.html