Okay, I admit that I am on the slow side in embracing new technology. When all my colleagues at the office had been using a smart phone for years, I still had an old-school Nokia in my hands (the battery did last for more than a day, by the way). I am probably also the last person on the planet not to use Facebook (and happy for it). This butterfly photography blog is about as far as I am willing to launch myself on social media and into cyberspace.
So when video came to the DSLR, I did not make much use of it. Maybe a few clips on holiday of thundering waterfalls and desert sandstorms and that was about it. Only when I had come home from the butterfly tour to Greece did I realize what I had missed out on, and adjusted accordingly. Let me explain this.
In Europe there are a couple of butterflies that usually pose with their wings closed, but can only be safely identified with their wings open. A good example is the Colias-group in the Whites & yellows (Pieridae) family. So apart from catching and studying them – not exactly my kind of play – the best option is to set your camera to high-speed mode and “spray and pray” when there is one flying by. This is what I did in Greece: take long bursts at 8 frames per second and hope that at least one captured the butterfly more or less sharp with its wings open. And actually, this worked amazingly well. This method did have two major drawbacks though: 1) I had to sort through dozens of frames to see if there was one good one and 2) sometimes, the butterfly made such wild and erratic movements that I could not capture it at all.
Then my new Iphone arrived with a 240 fps slow-motion setting. This kickstarted me wondering whether I could use this to film a flying butterfly and grab just the right frame for an ID. And the answer is: yes, it does. And why did I not think of this earlier?
In the city of Cuenca in Ecuador, a butterfly from the Pieridae family flew by when a cloud obscured the sun and it settled on a leaf. I took some close-up shots with its wings closed. Then set my Iphone to slow-motion mode and asked my wife to disturb the butterfly. And it worked exactly as I had hoped for. The startled butterfly took off right in front of my phone and I could capture the whole scene with 240 fps. The combination of underside and upperside was enough to identify it as a Black-celled Greeneyed-white (Leptophobia eleone).
In another instance in the Bellavista cloud forest, my wife and I took a short stroll through a hummingbird garden. Apart from the hummingbirds, the garden was also buzzing with butterflies from the Pareuptychia-group. I happened to know that there are a couple of species that are almost impossible to ID from the underside alone, so I again set the video to work. This time it was much harder though: the butterflies were very alert and flew off at the slightest disturbance. My Iphone has only a wide-angle lens so that was out of the question, so I fell back on my DSLR. My trusted 70D tops out at only 30 fps in Full HD though. In combination with the shallow depth of field of a 100mm macro lens, it would still be tricky if I grab the required frame at all.
From the underside, the butterfly looked an awful lot like the Double-white Satyr (Pareuptychia ocirrhoe).
Again my wife assisted me by startling the butterfly,and I tried to follow it through my lens. It quickly flew out of my viewfinder so I did not think much of it.
Once at home, all I managed to extract was this rather lousy frame. But the amount of white on the forewing compared to the little amount of brown was just enough to confirm my initial ID. A similar-looking Pareuptychia species would have had much more brown on the upper forewing. So mission accomplished after all!
I expect the use of video to ID butterflies to become standard practice in my toolbox, now that I have used it a couple of times succesfully. It gives me more frames to choose from compared to shooting stills and can provide you with that one important frame that you need to make an ID.
Red admiral 