Steven Bourelle Digital Arts

April Photo of the Month: Painted Lady Butterfly on Flowering Plum, Bishop CA

This month’s photo is an oldie but a goody. It’s a scanned slide that was taken in April of 2000. One of the highlights of the year in the Owens Valley is the migration of the Painted Ladies in March and April. The butterflies come up the valley from the south and in good years can number in the millions. In bad years though you may not see a single butterfly. The year I took this was a very good year.

The tree is a flowering plum and was not only full of beautiful pink flowers, but was also full of Painted Ladies. I’d say there were at least 20 – 30 butterflies flying around the tree. Even with that many, it was still difficult to get a nicely composed shot. Of all the shots I took that morning, this one was the best.

I rank this photo in my top 10 of all time. I just love the colors in it.

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This image was shot on the eastern side of Lake Michigan near the Grand Haven Lighthouse in Grand Haven, Michigan.

I had been photographing the surfers who where surfing near the pier at Grand Haven, (Yes that’s right, surfing on Lake Michigan. Read my post, Lake Michigan Surfers for proof.) waiting for the sunset to happen. When the sunset finally came it wasn’t much. There weren’t any clouds in the sky and the haze was killing the nice light on the lighthouse.

One thing that did stand out for me was the golden reflection in the water. It was really beautiful.

I ended up shooting many pictures of  the sun setting into the lake and the light reflecting off of the waves, but I think my favorite images from that evening were the ones where I focused just on the reflected color in the water. I feel they show nature’s simple beauty and the peacefulness of a Lake Michigan sunset.

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Wisconsin’s fall color season is quickly coming to an end, and with hight winds forecast for Thursday and Friday, it will be over by this weekend. With that in mind, I decided to get in one last day of fall color photography and headed out to Petrifying Springs Park yesterday.

I would say that about 70% of the trees are now bare in the park. There are more leaves on the ground than in the trees. What’s interesting is that I found myself noticing things that I didn’t notice when the colors were at their peak. Without my eye being drawn to the amazing colors overhead, I was able to see the smaller beauties that were all around.

The image above is a good example of that. At first I was drawn to the area by all the leaves on the ground, but as I walked around I noticed the contrast of the tree’s dark color with the bright leaves and really liked it. I wanted to emphasize that contrast so I lowered my composition to inches above the ground and framed the shot so the tree took up a large portion of the picture. My first shots had more sky in them, but the sky was kind of a distraction so I came in even tighter and left most of the sky out. I’m pretty happy with the final result.

You can see more images from yesterday on my SierraVisions post, Fall 2009, The Last Hoorah

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Here lately, while I’m waiting for the fall colors to really get going in Wisconsin, I’ve been going through some of my old images from the Eastern Sierra. Mostly images from the fall of 2005. I shot a lot of photos in Sept. and Oct. of ’05 and I remember being disappointed in many of them at that time. Looking at them now, four years later, I’m finding that I really like many of these images.

What I’m seeing are images that were composed nicely, but have some exposure and color issues. I’m sure at the time I was disappointed in these images because of that. I knew Photoshop very well in 2005, but I wasn’t nearly as knowledgeable as I am today. Now I can fix exposure and colors issues without even thinking to much about it. Another big difference between now and ’05 is Adobe Lightroom. It wasn’t even out back then. I think it came out in 2006 if I’m not mistaken. Lightroom has now become my main tool in post processing. It gives me the ability to fix the white balance and exposure  issues that many of these images have just by moving a couple sliders.

This image of an Eastern Sierra aspen grove is a perfect example. The white balance was very blue on it and it was slightly underexposed. I shot this image as a JPG, not a RAW, but I was still able to fix the white balance and exposure in Lightroom. Just by adding yellow and magenta I warmed the picture up and with some contrast made it look as I first envisioned it.

It’s pretty awesome to go back through my files and find these types of hidden treasures. I’m finding that as I become more knowledgeable with Lightroom and Photoshop, I can save images that I thought were lost.  Sometimes I turn them into black and whites, and sometimes I’m able to make them look as I wanted them to look when I first shot them.

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