This is another image taken in the Houston Museum of Natural Science during our long weekend there a couple of weeks ago. This butterfly was feeding on a slice of orange and I took advantage of the fact that it was sitting still for a few seconds to get this shot.
The more macro shots I take, the more I realise that the way to get good sharp images of fluttering creatures while using wide apertures is just to take a heck of a lot of images. By the law of averages, the more exposures you shoot (assuming you haven’t done something egregiously wrong in setting up the camera), the more will hit the focus in exactly the right place. Take this shoot, for example. I took just over 200 exposures in the butterfly exhibit. I culled these down to 67 that I am keeping and, of those, I’ve marked 12 as picks. A hit rate of about 5%. That doesn’t sound great but looking at it another way, I averaged one picture I am delighted with for every 5 minutes of shooting time. That’s a rate I can definitely be happy with.
I would expect a low hit rate when shooting macro due to the tiny depth of field but interestingly enough, this “keepers per hour” figure is exactly the same as the rate I got for the skyscraper pictures I had been taking earlier in the day. I took fewer exposures but, due to the time required to move between locations and set things up, my rate worked out at about 12 per hour (or 6 in the 30 minutes I had).