The painted lady butterfly.

Painted lady adults photographed in Palm Springs, Oct, 2023

One of the things I enjoyed about the trip we took this year to Palm Springs was the number and diversity of butterflies we saw.  One of the most common was the painted lady.  According to the website Butterflies at Home, the painted lady is "one of the most common butterfly species in the world."  They are found throughout most of North America and they migrate towards warmer climates as temperatures decline.  A relatively large and colourful Lepidoptern, I was eager to get as many good photos of them as I could.  

The larval form of the painted lady feeds on a variety of plants, including thistles, which makes it a beneficial insect.  On the other hand, they also will eat hollyhock and sunflower plants making them a bit of a pest.  You can see a picture of the caterpillar by clicking here and scrolling down.  The adults, however, are beneficial pollinators and the added splash of colour they bring to the garden is a welcome site.  

I photographed the insects using my d500 Nikon camera with a 500mm PF lens, a combination that I just love for both larger insects and birds.  The camera is equipped with a 20 mp sensor, not the largest one out there, but I have had good success with it when employing it with the 500.  As always, I shoot on manual exposure mode and compensate for the lighting as needed, often using the histogram of other shots done in similar lighting to verify my choices.  This way I can obtain good exposures as long as the illumination on the subject doesn't change.  I alter the shutter speed and ISO to produce the cleanest results I can get; I often find that an ISO setting of 200 gives me adequate shutter speeds without generating too much noise.

I managed to photograph almost a dozen species of butterfly on the trip.  One of the most interesting ones was the Queen butterfly; one I had never seen before.  I will do a blog on that a little later.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

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