Images from Nature


Site Map


Butterflies & Moths

Previous NextSmaller2003 Gallery


Cloudless Sulphur Butterfly
Cloudless Sulphur Butterfly
Phoebis sennae

A common roadside butterfly in eastern North America from Canada to Florida, this bright yellow butterfly has a striking golden-yellow eye.

This was one of my first studio pictures taken with my new 1Ds, and I was pleased with the result. Until I tried to print it! I then found that it had some distinct horizontal banding across the image, which made it effectively unprintable.

On investigation I found that I had made an error in the camera settings and I had underexposed the whole sequence by about two stops. This is easy to recover when shooting in RAW format, as the exposure can be corrected during software conversion to TIFF. Unfortunately however, I found from some popular camera forums that one of the the 1Ds' few faults is that it is prone to banding in dark areas when underexposed. It is mainly in the Red channel (Photoshoppers will know what I mean!) and some people reported success in smoothing their banding in this channel, but in my case the banding is too distinct and I have been unable to correct it. A lesson learned for the future ... don't underexpose!

Family: Pieridae
Genus: Phoebis
Latin name: Phoebis sennae
Common name: Cloudless Sulphur Butterfly