Spicebush Swallowtail Butterfly

This image has been added to all of the PRINTS galleries.

I have no story to tell you about this image. No behind the scenes anecdotal bit of insight. It is the result of a random encounter between myself and this Spicebush Swallowtail butterfly. After only a short stay on a Zinnia blossom to take some nectar, off it went and we both continued on our separate journeys. I would like to focus our attention on the background in this image. This was created by the very shallow “depth of field” effect when my 70mm – 300mm zoom lens was extended out all the way to 300mm for this close up image capture. Depth of Field is the measurement of what is actually in focus in any given image. At 300mm, the only objects that are in focus are the butterfly and the blossom. And everything else in front and behind the butterfly and blossom becomes blurry. And the objects only gets even more fuzzy the farther away the objects are from the subject in focus. The grass in our yard was captured as the light green blurry swath and the lowest branches of our Thuja trees was captured as the darker green blurry swath in the upper portion of the background. This shows you just how very shallow this depth of field really is.

In photography, there is a concept called “Bokeh”. It is more than just a term that describes the aesthetic quality of the out of focus or blurry parts in an image. It’s also the concept of how balanced the subject and it’s background are. I sadly reject so many images based only on my thinking that the background distracts from the subject too much. But I believe that this image has good “Bokeh”. The two tones of green help to accentuate the different subjects in this image without competing for attention on its own. The light green compliments the Zinnia blossom and the darker green compliments the dark wings of the butterfly. If I had been given a choice green would not have been first on the list as the background for this image. But when you are dealing with nature, you get what you are given. And in the end it turned out to be a perfect background after all.