Chasing Painted Ladies

[themosttogain]

Been a while since I posted anything to Foto Fair so I thought i'd share some photos from last weekend.

I grabbed my Sigma 105mm and visited a couple of supposed butterfly hotspots up in Holkham and the Norfolk Wildlife Trust site on the old Narborough Railway line. My main aim was to finally track down a White Letter Hairstreak, which I did manage to achieve and nab some shots of, although the little blighter refused to open his wings up for me!

Best part of the day though was the huge amount of Peacock, Red Admiral and Painted Lady that were showing at Holkham...the latter of which being the star of the day.

Painted Lady by Alan Watling, on Flickr

Painted Lady by Alan Watling, on Flickr

Painted Lady by Alan Watling, on Flickr

I also flirted with some blues...

Common Blue by Alan Watling, on Flickr

Common Blue by Alan Watling, on Flickr

..and a selection of others which I won't bore you with here! I suspect this post is image heavy enough!

Thanks for looking.

Alan

[Wee man]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

nice shots . bore away!

[knikki]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

There are fab shots.

[Olybirder]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

Excellent shots of some beautiful butterflies Alan. The Hairstreak looks good too on Flickr. There won't be many butterflies flying today.

Ron

[themosttogain]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

There won't be many butterflies flying today.

I don't mind today as i'm stuck at work anyway Always depressing looking out of the office on a sunny day wondering what i'm missing. Fingers crossed for a warm and sunny weekend to get a few more in!

[Mrs T]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

Lovely collection of butterfly shots, all well captured.

[mstphoto]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

Excellent shots!!
Great detail and clarity

Mike

[Dave in Wales]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

Truly excellent shot's, thanks for posting.

On a different note, can I ask you to share the secrets of your obvious PP skills, regarding sharpening and resizing.

My ORF's look terrific but when posted the sharpness goes all to pot, it's driving me mad.
I've very good glass, but I may as well be using the bottom of a bottle.

For instance....ORF or JPG...do you sharpen/resize/sharpen...etc.

I've Googled till I'm blue in the face but nothing seems to work 'properly'.

Seriously, being unable to post 'sharp' images is pushing me towards turning the 'whole' thing in and selling up.

[IainMacD]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

Superb shots

[themosttogain]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

On a different note, can I ask you to share the secrets of your obvious PP skills, regarding sharpening and resizing.

Thanks Dave,

Happy to share my not so secret secrets! I can tell you there's no resizing involved at all in my post processing.. Basically I shoot RAW and process in Olympus Viewer 3. It's slow and clunky compared to LR but the results I get out of it are far superior in my opinion...especially for noise removal. For these it was just whacking the sharpening up to +2 and the odd tweak to exposure and highlights etc..nothing more as they were shot at low ISO's anyway.

Once cropped slightly and exported to JPEG I use a high pass sharpening technique I found which uses Topaz Denoise to clean up the image sharpen the details you want without sharpening image noise. [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2aln2dLKdw"]High Pass Sharpening [/ame]

That's really it. There are other high pass sharpening methods that don't use Topaz, but as I had it installed already I gave it a go and the results were definitely better than any other techniques i'd tried.

Hope that helps!

Alan

[alfbranch]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

Very nice Alan and please do risk boring us with more if they are this good.

[Beagletorque]

Re: Chasing Painted Ladies

Lovely shots Alan, loving the fine details in there.