Firey Skipper Butterfly

Some of you may have noticed I've been "missing in action" during the last week. I must apologize for that. The truth is, I've been in a photographic rut for some strange reason.

So, yesterday, I forced myself to take my camera out in my backyard to see what I could find. I had really good luck, too!

I made, in my opinion, some of the best butterfly photos I've ever made. This one, the Firey Skipper is one I'm really proud of. He's rather small, and he's one that you probably wouldn't even notice unless you were looking for them. I've never seen their wings spread when they're resting, which makes them all the more difficult to see. They are only about 1 1/4" in length, and when compared to the blade of grass in front of him, or to the stamen on the Shephard's Needle flower he's suckling on, you can see just how small this one is.

This other shot shows his face more clearly. If you've been following my blogs, you know I have a fascination with faces on insects and butterflies, so when I captured this one, I was pretty excited.

I also captured photos of a Hairy Woodpecker, a Phaon Crescent butterfly, a White Peacock butterfly and a Cassius Blue butterfly. The Cassius Blue is even smaller than this Firey Skipper. So all in all I had a pretty productive day.

This Firey Skipper was shot at ISO 400 to get stop action speed, also because I was hand holding a 250mm lens, which gave me 1/800 sec at F7.1 to give me decent depth of field, I shot in aperture priority mode so I could be sure I'd have the sharpest aperture on my lens and good depth of field. I added +1/3 exposure compensation to open up the shadows.