Some recent stuff
Posted 03-22-2009 at 02:43 PM by AfricanButterflies
Hi all
We got some rather good butterflies recently. We went to Kranskloof Nature Reserve to look for early stages of the Karkloof Emperor Charaxes karkloof karkloof. Here is a fertile egg (you can tell from the brown band):
I only noticed the little white tick-like creature when I finished the 33-image stack.
And here is a first instar larva:
We were lucky enough to get one male adult in one of the fruit traps:
Underside
Upper side - these black butterflies are very difficult to light properly. They are distant cousins of the English Purple Emperor with similar habits - Tolkien mentioned black 'Purple Emperors' flying in Mirkwood in 'The Hobbit', it's amazing we actually get them in Africa!
The other brilliant thing we got this weekend was the very rare Bicolored Skipper Abantis bicolor. We found a new locality for them close to Hwayi, southwest of Durban. Here is the underside:
And here is the upper side:
Finally, I managed at last to get a decent upper side shot of a Pirate Catacroptera cloanthe:
Enjoy!
All the best
Steve
We got some rather good butterflies recently. We went to Kranskloof Nature Reserve to look for early stages of the Karkloof Emperor Charaxes karkloof karkloof. Here is a fertile egg (you can tell from the brown band):
I only noticed the little white tick-like creature when I finished the 33-image stack.
And here is a first instar larva:
We were lucky enough to get one male adult in one of the fruit traps:
Underside
Upper side - these black butterflies are very difficult to light properly. They are distant cousins of the English Purple Emperor with similar habits - Tolkien mentioned black 'Purple Emperors' flying in Mirkwood in 'The Hobbit', it's amazing we actually get them in Africa!
The other brilliant thing we got this weekend was the very rare Bicolored Skipper Abantis bicolor. We found a new locality for them close to Hwayi, southwest of Durban. Here is the underside:
And here is the upper side:
Finally, I managed at last to get a decent upper side shot of a Pirate Catacroptera cloanthe:
Enjoy!
All the best
Steve
Total Comments 2
Comments
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Gorgeous, again.Posted 03-22-2009 at 06:50 PM by JDArt
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The larva came out darker than I wanted; the lighting was very contrasty, probably due to the very shiny headshield. I kept getting blown highlights; I probably need to make myself a proper diffuser for this sort of shot instead of using tissue paper over the flash.Quote:Originally Posted by simonjoubert
Steve, the bug shots are wonderful but the dark nature of the other two have been bothering me since the original post. Another thing is the aura around the egg, top left, what is that?
The egg was at such a high magnification that I got some vignetting; that's why the BG is so dark. The 'aura' is on the RHS only and is just an out of focus highlight behind the egg, which the stack has overlapped. In Helicon Focus I could have cloned it out but it's not so easy in CombineZP. I'll have a go though.
All the best
StevePosted 03-23-2009 at 06:51 AM by AfricanButterflies
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