Shooting through

Marbled Whites have been out at Cleeve Prior Community Orchard for a few days now, but today was the first time I managed to get one on camera. As with many fresh male insects they're engaged on a near-frantic hunt for females, only coming to rest very briefly - usually deep among the grass and wild flowers - before zooming off again. I'd hoped I might catch one of them at a refuelling stop, but right now they barely seem to be feeding either.

Just to make things a bit more interesting, all the specimens I saw today were almost hysterically reactive, shooting up into the air if anything so much as twitched in their vicinity. If they don't calm down soon they'll wear themselves to a shadow before the females even appear. Luckily I was using the 100-500 zoom a friend of mine refers to as "the lazy man's macro", which meant that I could keep my distance and avoid adding myself to the list of other creatures - bees, flies, damselflies and other butterflies - that were triggering them, but even so it was a bit of a mission capturing anything other than blurry record shots.

This is hardly a competition-standard image, but I'm going to claim that it's sharp in all the important places. The blur on the left-hand wings is largely down to the angle between camera and subject, of course, but it's also partly due to the fact that I was shooting through foliage, and the pink grass on that side of the frame was clipping my view of the butterfly. This would have been a much bigger problem with a shorter lens, but at close quarters the long lens has such a wafer-thin depth of field that it blurred the grass enough for me to find it tolerable.

I'm putting in a second photo today, also taken in the orchard, of a male Azure Damselfly resting on the edge of an ox-eye daisy. When you can get a shot like this, with the insect in clear space and absolutely parallel to the lens, the 100-500 lens does a great job of isolating and presenting the subject. R loves a blue damselfly, so this one's for him.