I took one of my daughters and her friend to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. We saw dinosaurs, or the skeletons of dead ones, and ancient Egyptian mummies, they were also dead, among several other exhibits. There is also a really neat planetarium, and butterfly garden. Knowing that I was going to a butterfly garden, I brought my macro lens.

Butterflies can be a bit difficult to shoot because they keep flying away, but in the butterfly center I was in a target-rich environment and there was always something to shoot. And the butterflies often stayed still while I worked on focusing the manual focus lens. Here several butterflies are at a feeding cup.

With the very shallow depth of focus it was pretty easy to blur out the background structure of the butterfly center. You can vaguely see the outlines of the window panes in the background of the photo below.

My daughter and her friend waited patiently while I wandered around taking pictures.

There was also a large lizard in a cage inside the butterfly house. I’m not sure that this was a good idea for a butterfly house, but what do I know. The below photo was shot through the cage, but the bars in the foreground are so out of focus, that they don’t show up in the picture.

Well, that was my day trip. The girls had fun, I guess; It is hard to tell with teenagers. And I got to take a little time to shoot macros with all the captive butterflies.

Thanks for reading.