Flowering Fields

Within the smoky mountains tourists often come for the grand vistas, the unending cascades of mountains, the aw inspiring look at nature. The big animals, like bear, or elk, but sometimes the real beauty to behold is a tad bit smaller. Overlooking the fields at one of those aforementioned grand vistas, watching elk graze in the field, under the watchful eye of the ranger and the big bull, I noticed another scene playing out. Rows upon rows of purple wild flowers sprouting along the edges of the field, and right there, dancing butterflies. I dare not approach the scene, I dare not change lenses, I was looking for a shot of the elk. I hurriedly put the scene in my viewfinder and clicked away, before the two butterflies, simply fluttered away in the changing evening light.

I’ve often wondered about butterfly shots I see from time to time, them sitting on a few flowers, certainty an easy capture!… yet that’s not the whole truth, despite the fact that butterflies are never in much of a hurry to escape you, they never seem to be there when it’s time for their photo op. In this case, I noticed and reacted, camera in hand, zoomed all the way in at 560mm with my teleconverter sitting on my body. While I will often tell you how I feel about luck as a landscape photographer, you do, occasionally find yourself getting lucky.

The edit here, very simple, a quick color correction, some saturation, and a little light balancing. That’s it. More technical than that, I brought the yellows up, the purples I pulled back and left the greens roughly as they were. No real major color correction, some slight clarity on just the butterflies and a simple curve on my histogram. Simple, yet very satisfying to not have to put a large amount of work into a photo. Though, to be fair, I hardly feel it fair to call photo editing work for me. Cathartic, joyous, as a sculptor releasing a figure from stone.

Until Next Time!

Aperture: f8
ISO: 800
SS: 1/250th
Focal: 560mm

Fujinon 100-400mm TC 1.4X