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| Butterfly House & Insectarium Missoula, Montana |
I visited the Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium greenhouse to try my hand at photographing busy butterflies. The insects move fast and there was not a lot of light available. However, the light was constant, so I chose manual exposure mode. I wanted a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion of the butterflies, so I set 1/2000 second. I set the aperture to f/5.6 to give me a little more depth of field in case I did not have the camera exactly parallel to the butterfly's wings. These two settings then required a high ISO of 2000 which resulted in some digital noise.
In my raw photo editing software, I used Denoise to remove the speckles without hurting the details of the butterfly's antennae, proboscis and wings. The background was brighter than my subject, so I selected the butterfly and brightened it. Then I reversed the selection to the background and made that darker. I love how I can switch the light to bring the viewer's attention to my subject instead of the background.
Learn how to set the exposure controls on your camera manually to record a raw photo; then apply some basic edits to the picture to make it match your vision. I teach both these skills in my class Advance Your Digital Photography, starting September 1, 2026, at the Lifelong Learning Center in Missoula, Montana. Click here for details and registration.