If you’re from Rhode Island the idea of driving from Providence to Warwick means you need to pack a lunch and maybe make hotel reservations to stay overnight…for a 20 minute drive. No, seriously. It does. People from RI don’t drive far, a 3o minute commute is almost unheard of and I’ve had patients leave my practice because they’ve moved to the next town over (but yes, they come back after the first few visits to a new dentist, and complain about how long it takes to get there). So when I showed up at work on Tuesday with a thumbdrive full of butterfly pictures did I get oohs and ah’s? Only after I was roundly berated for driving 2 hours through beautiful country (well except maybe for Worcester) to get to Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory. I’ve been bugging Mike (:P) for about 6 months to go up there and I think he finally got tired of my nagging to go with me. We had an awesome time, even if the butterflies had it in for him, mobbing him to the point of irritation (they liked his lotion apparently). It also was a great opportunity to play with the new 5DMII and I went armed with a backup battery and 2 extra cards since I was going to shoot full raw (21mb) instead of sraw1 that I had been doing and I wanted to see how good it looked.
The place is awesome, unfortunately the sun wasn’t out for most of the day so the light was not great, very diffuse and required use of my 580EX flash, which I really need to get more proficient in use with anyhow. The low light also allowed me to really see what was true or not true about the low noise at higher ISO. And…it’s true, it’s true.
A Swallowtail Butterfly (I don’t know what sub-species, didn’t take the card to identify them like I should have) at ISO 800, no flash, 98mm f/9:
And this is the 10% crop to show the detail in the wing:
I’m impressed. The only work done to the image was in LR2 adjusting the exposure, the black point and brightness and a touch of sharpness with smart sharpen in CS4 and my sig. There is noise, no doubt but it’s less than I see sometimes when I use ISO200 on my 30D, and the resolution. Oi! I’ve been in heaven working on these images. I don’t know if I can afford to shoot full raw all the time, it chews up a 16G CF card pretty quickly and even with 2.5TB of backup hard drive space they are hogs. I suppose I could be much better in just deleting the raw files I don’t plan on using but I just feel like I never know what might strike my fancy in times to come.
Owl’s Eye Butterfly:
