The butterfly exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science offers a little slice of rain forest enclosed in a glass dome. It’s a wonderful place to hang out with a macro lens and a flash. During our last visit, I only had 30 minutes or so to play but I could easily have spent the whole afternoon there.
In the past, we’ve always visited in the summer and the exhibit is almost-unbearably hot and humid then. I expected the same when we visited in December but was pleasantly surprised that it was not heated to the normal summer temperature. Although the humidity was still high, it wasn’t at all uncomfortable to spend time inside the dome and, for once, I left without feeling that someone had thrown a bucket of warm water over me!
For the technically inclined, this was taken using my Nikon 28-300mm and 56mm of extension tube. Lighting was via a Nikon R1C1 macro flash with two heads installed on the ring at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock, one dialed a stop lower than the other.