Grand Cayman Butterflies

Here are a few of the butterfly photos I took in Grand Cayman, mostly at the Butterfly Farm. (Click on them to enlarge.) They're not as skittish as some animals, but they do have a bad habit of sitting still until just when you're ready to shoot and then flitting off. Or they come to rest in a spot impossible to photograph. At least in the Butterfly Farm there's a higher concentration so you get more opportunities.







As with most of my nature photos, these were taken with the Canon S3 IS at full (12x) zoom (except for the one with Shelley in the background). The zoom allows you to keep a little distance and not spook them but still get closeups. One problem is that you don't have a lot of depth of focus and since the focusing is automatic it's tricky getting the camera to focus on what you want. A lot of the shots were a write-off because they were out of focus. That's where a DSLR might be better but it would be hard to match the zoom range and the image stabilization, let alone the price.

Here's me busy at the Butterfly Farm (photo by Shelley).