Tag: Key West

Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory

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I recently took a vacation with my family to Key West for a week.  My mom loves butterflies, so I went with her to the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory.  The Butterfly Conservatory is essentially a green house full of plants, trees, birds and hundreds of free flying butterflies.  I quickly discovered it is very hot and humid in the conservatory as the butterflies need the right temperature and humidity to thrive.  I of course brought my camera and decided to see if I could capture some butterfly photos for my mom to take home with her.

Despite being a very hot and sunny day, the lighting in the conservatory was not as bright as I thought it might be.  I had a hard time getting the shutter speed I needed to capture crisp photos of the butterflies even when they were sitting still.  In order to get any photos that were not a blur of colors, I had to bump up my ISO to about 800.  To capture the butterflies in flight, I had to use 1600.  I also had to use between a 2.8 and 5.6 aperture.  2.8 was the only option when trying to capture shots of moving or flying butterflies.  As a result many of my in-flight or action shots only have part of the butterfly in focus due to the narrow focal plane of my lens at 2.8.

The green butterfly would not keep its wings open once it landed on a flower or bush.  In order to get a shot of the wings I had to capture it in flight.  It took numerous tries but I finally got one I liked.  This was my moms favorite one so most of my time was spent chasing this species around the conservatory.

I have not done much butterfly photography in the past but I had a good time and found it to be a good change of pace from my normal subjects.

Key West Southern Most Point by Moonlight

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I was in Key West this past weekend for my wife’s birthday.  I brought my camera equipment but was to busy most of the time to take any pictures.  However, I did have one shot I wanted to try while I was there.  I wanted to try and capture the Southern Most Point Marker at night with the stars and moon behind it.

I scouted the location the first night I was there to check on the moon angle and contemplate the shot.  I also found that even at 10:00 PM there were still people taking tourist shots in front of the marker.  I came back the second night a little later to see if I could limit the chances of having a crowd to contend with.  No such luck.  New people arrived about every 5-10 minutes so I had to keep resetting my shot between groups.

The other problem I had was that the marker is located on the corner of two intersecting streets.  In order to capture the stars in the background I was shooting 20 -30 second exposures.  Inevitably within that time frame a car would come down the road and cause blowouts on the marker from the headlight reflections.  It took a few tries before I could get a usable shot.  I never could get a perfectly clean shot.  I also had to take a few shots specifically for the moons exposure and then combine the two photos together.  I used my Canon 10-22 to capture the Southern Most Point Marker and stars and my 70-200 to capture the moon in more detail.

All in all I am happy with the outcome.  I just need to do a test print to see how it looks printed.  I have found that star pictures are less dramatic when they are not back-lit by a computer monitor.  Also, the stars standout in the high resolution shot more than the web upload shot used for this blog.  In the photo below it only looks like there are a handful whereas the high resolution version probably has around 100 stars visible.