Beginner Small White, Closed wings.

A constant battle having enough shutter speed, DOF and getting the desired areas of the subject in focus and that's without the additional task of getting the exposure nailed. No small task getting it all to happen at the same time.

I've been playing around with this for a week now and it's certainly more difficult than what I usually photograph.

Nice to see more butterflies around this year, that's for sure.

Regards

Tim
 
A constant battle having enough shutter speed, DOF and getting the desired areas of the subject in focus and that's without the additional task of getting the exposure nailed. No small task getting it all to happen at the same time.

I've been playing around with this for a week now and it's certainly more difficult than what I usually photograph.

Nice to see more butterflies around this year, that's for sure.

Regards

Tim
It's certainly more challenging at smaller sizes. And the extension tubes narrow everything even more.
 
A constant battle having enough shutter speed, DOF and getting the desired areas of the subject in focus and that's without the additional task of getting the exposure nailed. No small task getting it all to happen at the same time.

Yes, I think this was tricky from the shutter speed, ISO and aperture/DoF point of view.

It was f/14, 1/125, ISO 560. I'm not sure a smaller aperture to get more DoF would have helped. If that was hand-held then 1/125 might have been a bit on the slow side, so decreasing the aperture to get more DoF would have increased the risk/amount of loss of detail/sharpness.

What about IS? Even if the lens has IS it may not help too much as the magnification increases. Even less so perhaps with extension tubes, especially if the lens doesn't know the extension tubes are there and/or doesn't/can't adjust its IS to take that into account. (I'm guessing here that extension tubes make a difference to the effectiveness of IS.)

I think many people would use around f/11 on APS-C for butterflies. This would have given a little more shutter speed. Also, you may have some latitude with ISO. There is no free lunch of course, because increasing the ISO decreases detail, but if you are in the critical region of shutter speed where it is slow enough to make a significant difference then you might gain overall by upping the ISO to get the shutter speed up. You might gain more from the faster shutter speed than you lose from the higher ISO.

It can take a fair bit of experimentation to get to some rules of thumb as to what combinations of settings work, for you, using your kit, for different types of captures.
 
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