Black Swallowtail Birthday

I posted one of these on my 365 Thread, but I thought it was worth posting as a set. We had a sextet of Black and Yellow Swallowtail Caterpillars invade our herb garden two weeks back. Five of them disappeared, either entering the food chain or wandering off to pupate somewhere we couldn't find. One of them assumed a rather unusual position on a branch and about 36 hours later, while we slept, it became a chrysalis. We kept a close watch on it, hoping to catch it emerging. The location was such that I didn't want to stick a D800 on a tripod shooting interval shots for hours unwatched, so we kept walking out every so often to check. On a particularly busy morning, during a conference call I hear my wife shouting, "It's out!! It's out!!" I stuck the phone on mute, grabbed my D800 w/ Sigma 105mm already on it and headed outside. I'm guessing we missed the emergence by about 20 minutes. Would have loved to have watched, but we're thankful we didn't come out an hour later.

I'm really liking them! Great looking shots!

Impressive!! I really like how they came out... Great job!

Pat in NH

Hi Jake,

This is a very difficult situation: a black subject on a lighter background! Or the
​other way around.

No camera can handle such cases correctly. Not even my single digits bodies…
without compensation prior to shooting. This is a shot by shot process.

IMHO, in order to render the more dramatic set of colours present in your shot,
I would suggest that the tones be rendered by about -1/3. This would make the
blacks somewhat deeper without blocking them and saturate the colours that
would not need any further tweaking.

I, for one, would be very curious to see the difference these would bring to
your otherwise very cool shots!

Have a good day…


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Kodiak, I absolutely understand what you're saying, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out precisely what I wanted to show in these photos, which ultimately became the intricacy of a newly emerged creature. Let's use the bottom photo as the example for discussion purposes since this is probably the most dramatic transition. Stopped down even -1/3 I begin to lose the pattern in the fabric of the wing in the black areas, and I particularly lose the feathery texture in the thorax area, which is just beginning to dry out. I still get enough that I could be happy with it, but ultimately this is where I wanted them.

My edits were done in Photoshop, including some tweaking with Nik Viveza 2, producing a PSD file. I took that edit and played with the Lightroom sliders for EV and that saw that I lost the detail rather quickly. Instead, I decided to try to boost the blacks, which worked a little better, but by the time they were "black enough" I was still losing details I wanted in shadows, so I bumped the shadow slider. Here's the same image with -60 on the Blacks slider and +10 on the Shadows. Probably a little more the look you'd prefer.

Hi Jake,

I assume you shot these in RAW. Do you always use PS to convert your picts?

I do shoot RAW. Do I always use PS? Not by a rule. I was a Lightroom-Only guy for most of the last 2 years. That said, depending on what I want to do with the photo I will use Photoshop, either to invoke the Nik Plug-ins (I like the flexibility to use Smart Layers in PS so I can go back and tweak when I stack plug-ins) or to do corrections that are easier/better done there (spot removal and smart fill, which I used in a couple of these to remove a stray branch that otherwise detracted from the photo. I do all my RAW preprocessing in Lightroom first, plus lens profile correction, cropping, straightening, white balance correction, etc., and then send it to Photoshop to do the rest, if necessary. It works well for me. When I get the PSD file back, depending on the level of work and size of the file I will either stack it as a group with the original RAW file, or delete the RAW file (which has been archived elsewhere) since I have the Lightroom processed version as the base layer in my PSD file. The more radical the tweaking in PS, the more apt I am to keep the original around. With D800 files, Photoshop files with Smart Layers can get very big, very quickly, so if I'm happy with the edit I may also collapse a couple visible layers to reduce the overall size (a 40MB D800 RAW file can become 1 Gig rather quickly with Smart Layers).

Some truly outstanding stuff there!