Stratford Butterfly Farm January 2013

On a cold and snowy day in January we visited the Stratford Butterfly Farm in Stratford on Avon - very excited as butterflies are one of my favourite photographic subjects. They are however also one of the trickiest to get right - they never seem to hold their wings in the correct plane to enable the correct depth of field!!

Also as it was cold outside I had concerns about cameras and lenses fogging up as soon as we went inside the flight area - a great tip here is to keep the camera and lens in a plastic bag or one of those zipped plastic folders. This reduces the effect of the temperature difference and I have to say it was a great success. Instead of waiting about 30 minutes I was able to start shooting after no more than 5 minutes without needing to clean the lens at all. Brilliant! This meant I could maximise my time in with the butterflies.

Despite being January there were a good variety of butterflies flying (along with parrots, cockatiels, quails and an iguana). At any one time there can be around 1500 butterflies from 250 species and 20 countries from around the world.

I must have spent around 3 hours in heaven taking as many images of as many butterflies as possible. My target was to get a good image of the glasswing butterfly (Greta Oto) which I think I managed.

If you like butterflies then this is a place you must go - admission is reasonable (we used tesco vouchers!) and you can spend as much time as you like

Stratford Butterfly Farm December 2010

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!