BIF - bird in flight, butterfly in flight

The bird in flight in this photo is just an embellishment that happened to fly by as I was shooting what I envisioned as an abstract set of shapes and colors. I was eager to grab the shot while the one was perched on the corner of the building's roof, but didn't see the flier until it entered the frame. There was no time to raise the shutter speed to freeze the movement. I simply tripped the shutter in reaction to what I saw. The blur of motion works, I think, as a contrast to the solid structures behind and below it.

(By the way, believe it or not, there is also a dragonfly in flight, clearly visible in the original full-size photo, to the left of the flying bird and below the perched one! It looks like a dust spot when the size is reduced for the web.)

This butterfly made a brief visit to some nearly dead flowers in our driveway. I had no chance to train the lens on it while it perched, so I tried to catch it in flight. I fired off just two frames, but the second one was successful in showing off the wings and antennae. Yay! It never hurts to try. One of the marvelous things about digital photography is how quickly we can find out whether we've had any success with things that move too quickly for our eyes to be sure what we've caught. Those of you who grew up in the dark ages of film and chemical development will certainly understand why I value this and try not to take it for granted.

Aside from flying creatures, one thing that these two images have in common is that they were shot with the same lens, a 100 mm macro. This is a lens specially designed to focus very close and allow large images of small objects with great detail rendition. It can also be used for portraits, though, and the little architecture/bird/sky abstract above was shot during a brief break amid portrait shooting.

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Jess Isaiah Levin

www.jilcp.com