Today I have just a few butterfly close-ups. When I went down to shoot wildflowers, I noticed a lot of butterflies and went back with a longer lens. I then tried to get close enough to the butterflies to take some pictures. But the butterflies are easily spooked.
My main problem was keeping my shadow out of the shot as the sun was low on the horizon and my shadow was long. I tried to crouch down close to a butterfly without crushing any flowers and get as close to the minimum focus distance of my 200mm lens as possible (140cm). This usually resulted in spooking the butterfly, so I didn’t get that close.
There was quite a variety of butterflies in this field and I hung around a while trying to get photos of different ones.
The last one is probably my favorite because the paterns on its wings kind of look like eyes to me.
These images were all cropped a little bit to get in closer. There is plenty of resolution in the image to do this for putting on the internet. I am not sure that a macro lens would have done me any good as I couldn’t really get that close to the butterflies before they butterflew away.
Jason Frels 
They’re elusive critters. I’ve found that most insects are that way. Except ants. They’ll crawl right up to you. Beautiful shots. I think I read somewhere that the eyespots on the wings help to fool predators such as birds, into thinking that this is a creature too big to kill and eat.
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We recently went on a hike at Canyon of the Eagles where I tried to photograph as many species of flower and butterfly as I could. There was a smallish yellow/green butterfly that seemed more easily spooked. I was pretty frustrated at chasing those down trying to get _one_ shot. Eventually, I found some on the ground, and in that state, they didn’t seem to want to move as much.
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