Chester zoo butterfly house 15 may

Well!  guess what ?   yes you guessed its Raining again!  Arghhhh

So the only option is to practise shooting butterflies in the nice warm butterfly house at Chester zoo.
its always good to spend a few hours in amongst the tropical butterflies, usually a few new species to see and try to shoot along with the usually favourites:)

I decided to start off shooting with 100mm macro with a full set of extension tubes to do a few high mag portraits, all of which are focus stacked to increase depth of field.
here is an owl butterfly

These are probably the most common species seen in the house along with Blue Morpho,   Here is a blue!

At the far end of the house there is a small pool and stream, and fruit is put down for the butterflies to feed on, the Indian leaf butterfly especially likes to feed on fruit:)

After shooting enough close ups , i took the tubes of and just used the 100mm macro, there were plenty of Ithomids flying , so here are a few shots of these beauties .

A White Morpho had been fluttering around for ages , quite an ungainly flyer and it eventually landed long enough to shoot this image!  Stunning!

       
  It always fascinates me watching them feed, the length of their proboscis uncoiling to probe the centre of the flowers:)    very difficult to shoot while getting very close and still have enough available light to keep a high enough shutter speed to prevent motion blur!

                                                                          and a bit closer!

               Back to full body shots:)    Indian leaf perched up!  just in front of previous image!
                                                      amazing patterns on this individual!

wings open showing the glorious colour!  almost like flashing a warning to predators to keep away!

                                                                                finally

          Another stunning butterfly:)) managed to get really nice light and isolation in this image!
                                                            my favourite image of the day!

                              all images canon 5d2 , 100mm L macro , extension tubes