How to Photograph Butterflies

Butterflies are the most beautiful insects (Lepidoptera) which are having colourful wings come from Moth family. The best way to photograph butterflies is to understand the behaviour of their life. Butterflies photography techniques are plays a very important part while find and take beautiful butterfly photography. Let discussed how to photograph butterflies.

Table of Content:

How to Find and Take Beautiful Butterfly Photography

Butterfly Photography - techniques - Learn about Butterflies

How to photograph butterflies in flight.

Best way to photograph butterflies

Best lens for butterfly photography

Best camera for butterfly photography.

Butterfly photography equipment.

What is butterfly lighting in photography?

Best Camera Settings for butterfly photography

How to Find and Take Beautiful Butterfly Photography

Butterflies can be found in summer and springtime, while flowers getting bloom and attract butterflies. In winter also various butterflies can be seen. Before we start photograph butterflies we should do some sort of research about their life cycle, behaviour and types of butterflies along with photographs. This will help us to identify their species along with names.

Butterflies can be seen in our neighbourhood, just need to understand what types of flowers attract them. You should visit several times and identify the spot and you can find them easily.

Butterfly Photography - Techniques - Learn about Butterflies

The best technique to photograph butterflies is to have patience. It is not about chasing butterflies and running behind, we should have quite a movement take a proper place to set your equipment preferable near the follower's bed which will attract them. In the initial time, I did many mistakes, you cannot control your emotion while you see enormous colourful butterflies around you and you keep chasing them. This is a wrong idea.

The techniques say prefer to use a tripod to get shake-free images. It’s not easy to capture butterflies in one shoot if you try to use the handheld camera you can but make sure you avoid shaking your hand, the best way to use a tripod to get sharp images.

Suggestion: Best Entry Level Tripod 

Digitek DTR 550LW Lightweight Tripod (Maximum Load up to 5 kg), 5.57 Feet Tall for Digital SLR & Video Cameras, Made Aluminium Material (DTR 550LW)

Best lens for butterfly photography / Best camera for butterfly photography / Butterfly photography equipment

To use the ordinary kit lens to get better images of butterflies is very difficult. The best lens is a Macro lens 100mm or 50mm as per your budget. The macro lens helps you to get a blurred background that gives your images sharp and closeup shot.

Another the best lens is a Telephoto lens like 70-200mm or 70-300mm, telephoto will help you to get better images from a distance without disturbing butterflies in their natural habitat. You can use a reversing ring or extension tube on your kit lens it can be a good alternative if you have a limited budget. This will help you to magnify the images but you will lose the autofocus.

There is no camera is called good or bad, If you are a beginner you can invest in entry-level cameras even you can start with your phone. In the market many brands are available like Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fuji all brands are equally good, it depends on your purposes.

In the other-equipment tripod is well recommended if you want sharp shake-free images. Tripod will help you to steady your camera while pressing the shutter button without shaking it and ended up with blur pictures.

Best Camera Settings for butterfly photography

The best camera settings butterfly photography is required good techniques if you fumble while capturing you might scare the butterflies and they will fly away.

Aperture: Although you are using Macro Lens and you will get a blurred background in f1.8, f2.8 and if you using aperture f5.6 to f8 the depth of field will produce sharp pictures.

ISO: The best ISO setting is between 100 to 400. Most preferably 100 ISO will give you noise-free images. While lights are not adequate you can increase the ISO to 400.

Shutter Speed: Butterflies always moving and to freeze it in your frame you cannot keep your shutter speed below 1/200. If you don’t boost your shutter speed your pictures will comes blurry. Anything above 1/500 will gives you sharp, crisp images.

Focusing Mode: It prefers to use Continuous or AI Servo Focus Mode as per the camera model.
This setting will help you to track the movement of butterflies and your images will come in focus as sharp. Just press your shutter release button half check your subject are in focus or not. You can use the Manual Focus option if you are confident to use it.

Conclusion

Butterflies are restless insects, it’s very hard to capture them into your camera frame. Don’t be impatience let the butterfly settled in flower bed wait for the right moments, check your composition. The only way to photograph butterflies to have correct techniques and timing.

The most important have fun enjoy the moments, butterflies are colourful beautiful creatures just understand their behaviour and you will find it’s easy to photograph butterflies.

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About Kanchan Saha

This is Kanchan Saha. Here I am sharing photgraphy realted blog. I will be grad if you all like, comments and share to inspire

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