Blog Archives
Nature Challenge-Day 1
Dear Friends, this is the first butterfly of the season for me and the first of the seven day nature challenge. This is a spicebush swallowtail on a common milkweed flower, enjoy til Tomorrow MJ
Mourning Summer
Dear Friends, i am in mourning, i love summer and all the colors that our warm weather brings, now the fall is gone, winter and the blues of ice and snow are pending. Christmas is coming so i am momentarily distracted by family activities and all that is good, but when the cold sets in and the temps reach the minus range, i hate going outside, but i force myself and bundle up my body to fight the cold, i can stay out until my camera freezes, then i am out of luck, so til Tomorrow MJ
Weekly Photo Challenge: Summer Lovin
Friends, i love photographing beauty in nature and especially macro work, so while nosing around the wild lilies,in my childhood we called them tiger lilies, i discovered a small butterfly nectaring inside the cup. He is a hairstreak and these small creatures are easily confused with the Karner Blue, a rare butterfly also found in Crex Meadows. til Tomorrow MJ
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/summer-lovin/ other contributions on this theme can be found at this link
Eyespots
Friends, went south for the weekend to Iowa to explore some tall grass prairie. Found this butterfly, the common buckeye, very pretty but perched in lots of junk, so had to blur out the background. Photoshop to the rescue. Don’t you just love the eyespots, my friend is in opthalmology so this butterfly is for her, enjoy til Tomorrow MJ
Wing Detail or Abstract
Friends, a macro to test my lens, this is a Monarch butterfly wing, up close and personal, i was experimentingwith the detail extractor and color contrast settings in color effex pro, the fuzzy is the details of the wing scales, til Tomorrow MJ
A Rare Butterfly?
Friends, normally you find monarch butterflies all over the Northwestern corner of Wisconsin, but this year they have been scarce in Crex. So i took a little trip south to Fish Lake Refuge on Thursday and in my wanderings, was able to find eight of these on the abundant blazing star flowers. Maybe the second hatch has been successful or my friend, Agogo is releasing a sustaining population. I like the little slash of orange contributed by the backlight on this particular butterfly. Not sure that i like the color scheme, pink and orange, but i like the bokeh. til Tomorrow MJ
Another Karner
Friends, could not resist showing you one more Karner Butterfly, and endangered specie here in Crex Meadows. This is a better image in that he is perched on a lead plant flower instead of the usual scat perch and the blue spots on his hind wing are showing their iridescent glow. The light needs to be right for those spots to glow and look like abalone. The bokeh is also better than the previous image. til Tomorrow MJ
Skipper
Friends, this tiny skipper is sipping from the vervain that is abundant in Crex right now . His yellow head suggests that he is a Dun Skipper, maybe someone can help with the identification. I am far from a butterfly expert. I like his proboscis looped in the air and i like the bokeh. The background was rendered as amorphous because the distance between the subject and background was greatly out of focus. I am not always so lucky. til Tomorrow MJ
Another Flutterby
Friends, The last few days I have been chasing butterflies in Crex Meadows, and stumbled upon this beauty. I think it is a Wood Nymph and i love the eyespots on its wing. Now the disgusting part, he is sitting on animal scat of some kind and this is the most reliable place to find butterflies this time of year. Wish it had been perched on a pretty flower but alas, I have blackened that part of the image. Forgive me for photoshoping, but it really was disgusting . til Tomorrow MJ
A Spot of Yellow
Friends, snow again today, I think that spring is sleeping it off somewhere :), I went to my archives and found this image of summer yellow, a macro that shows the proboscis looping into the flower, sipping soda thru a straw on a summer day, is that a song title? it should be a song title, i think this is a sulfur butterfly with the white eyespot on the hind wing, til Tomorrow MJ
MJ Springett 