A visit to Stratford Butterfly Farm a few days ago - great shots of butterflies along with some caterpillars and pupae. This is a fantastic place to go (especially in the winter as there are not too many other people there!) - biggest and best of the butterfly houses I have been to in the UK.
Photos now on the web site - check out the page entitled Butterfly Farm (or follow this link)http://www.gfcphotography.co.uk/other-butterflies
The Butterfly Farm itself was a fascinating place to visit - the butterflies themselves are well worth the entrance fee (this and lots of other details can be found at http://www.butterflyfarm.co.uk/attraction/index.php) The inclusion of the caterpillar house made for an even more enjoyable visit. The variety of sizes and colours of both larvae and pupae was amazing. The opportunity for photographing them was too good to miss so a very enjoyable hour or so was spent in this room.
Then it was time to go out into the butterfly house itself - and it was huge. Easily the largest I have been too in the UK and even in the middle of winter it was being kept warm and humid. As the camera and lenses had been acclimatised already there was no steaming up of lenses (nor my glasses!) and again the variety of species was impressive. There were the big showy butterflies such as the Owl Butterfly but also other lesser seen species in these sort of houses like the Leaf Butterfly and some smaller white ones which I do not know the name of yet.
Most of the pictures were taken with my Canon 100mm Macro lens (no IS but as the tripod was invariably used this was not a problem) although some were taken with my 100-400mm lens (which I have discovered is a really good lens for butterfly photography).
I will add names of species etc as I discover them!
