This article features photographs of captive butterflies in flight captured handheld with the M.Zuiko 100-400 zoom at the Niagara Butterfly Conservatory.

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It has been quite a while since I used my M.Zuiko 100-400 mm f/5-6.3 IS zoom lens so I decided to get in some practice time with it.

I started off photographing a few perched butterflies, but then quickly moved on to butterflies in flight.

I ended up shooting primarily at one end of the indoor facility, with the majority of my images captured while I was sitting on a bench.

This shooting position gave me good sight lines to two different plantings of flowers that were attracting different species of butterflies. I used about a 45 degree shooting area from my seated position.

The same species of butterflies tended to congregate around specific blossoms. This gave me a good number of opportunities to capture these captive butterflies in flight.

In took about 25 minutes to capture all of the captive butterflies in flight featured in this article.

I used Pro Capture H for all of the captive butterflies in flight images. Since this technology locks exposure and auto-focus based on the first frame of an image run, I stopped my lens down to f/8 for most of my images, to give me more depth-of-field.

As is my standard practice when using Pro Capture H, I had my Pre-Shutter Frames and Frame Limiter both set to 15. I used a frame rate of 60 frames-per-second. These settings gave me 1/4 second of shutter response time.

I used a shutter speed of 1/2500 for the majority of my photographs of butterflies in flight. Most of my images were captured with my lens fully extended to 400 mm (efov 800 mm).

I had to be selective in terms of which butterflies in flight I chose for my images as it was a bit challenging to get them in positions that were well separated from the background in my compositions.

Flight angle was also an important image consideration as the butterflies that were flying parallel to my focal plane tended to yield the best action captures.

From a pragmatic standpoint it also made sense to concentrate some of my efforts on the larger sized butterflies.

It was a bit of a challenge to get a lot of variety in my images in terms of shooting angles and blossoms… but I viewed this as a practice session so I wasn’t overly concerned.

The M.Zuiko 100-400 mm f/5-6.3 IS was a good lens for this type of subject matter as it size and weight suited the situation quite well.

The next time I visit the Niagara Butterfly Conservatory with the goal of photographing captive butterflies in flight, I plan on using my M.Zuiko 150-600 mm f/5-6.3 IS… so I can assess the relative merits of these two telephoto zoom lenses when photographing this specific subject matter.

Technical Note

Photographs were captured handheld using camera gear as noted in the EXIF data. All images were created from RAW files using my standard process in post. This is the 1520 article published on this website since its original inception in 2015.

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