American Copper

I found this on the edge of my yard a couple of days ago. This little copper was moving around quite a bit, sampling all the tiny flowers on this goldenrod, so I was not shooting real close. However, I was so pleased with the detail captured in the butterfly (see larger version), I made this horizontal crop from the vertical frame I shot.

Processing Note: The natural light was not bright, but it was beautifully soft, so I did not want to ruin it with a flash. At f/8, the DOF was pretty shallow, so parts of the butterfly were a little soft in all my shots. However, thanks to a very gentle breeze, I got two shots in a burst that have slightly different points of focus. Thus I was able to take a perfectly-focused part of a hind wing and paste it onto another shot from the burst where everything else was in focus -- sort of an on-the-fly stacking technique for live, moving subjects.

Canon 50D
Sigma 150 mm. f/2.8 Macro
1/50 sec. @ f/8; ISO 400
Tripod
Two images hand-blended for increased depth-of-field.