Name: Andrew Fusek Peters
Picture title: Painted Lady in the Garden
Category: Butterflies & Dragonflies
Nationality: British
Occupation: Photographer / Author

Andrew says:
‘I had just had my cancer diagnosis in the autumn of 2019. I was waiting for surgery and could not go far so spent a lot of time in our garden. It was a wonderful late summer and lots of butterflies came to nectar on my wife’s flowers, including Verbena bonariensis.  I had just started shooting with the Olympus camera system and began to wonder if it might be possible to photograph butterflies in flight. Sports action sequences were my inspiration. If I got a set of shots at 60 frames per second, with the butterfly taking off in the plane of focus, set at the first shot, I thought they might make up an action sequence, a sort of time lapse in a single frame to show motion but also movement through a fraction of a second.

This was my first decent sequence, with four good Raw files from the moment the painted lady took off until it left the frame. The photos were layer masked in Photoshop to produce this composite. The result inspired me to really develop my butterfly in flight shots but this was the beginning point, a close up wonder revealing the painted lady in all its aerial glory.’

Technical information:
Olympus E-M1 Mk II
Olympus M.Zuiko 40-150mm F2.8 PRO
ISO 500
1/5000sec at f/2.8
Accessories: Handheld
Post processing: Four Raw files layer masked in Photoshop to produce composite, basic adjustments

Website: andrewfusekpeters.com
Instagram: andrewfusekpeters
Facebook: Andrew Fusek Peters photography
Twitter: 2peters