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Shooting Butterflies is a tricky affair especially in tropical countries. The opportunity they provide for a photographer is very brief.  One has to be very much alert and observant. One must  know their habits and  food plants as well as the plants where they prefer to roost.

It is the migration time for butterflies and they are in the last leg of their migration in my part of India. Yesterday evening I was searching for such rooting butterflies in my garden ( designed to attract butterflies).  And I found this beautiful “Lime Butterfly” which was fluttering here and there to find a suitable place to settle for the night.  After I ensured its settlement I approached it in a very slow phased manner. First, I calculated the working distance by moving the camera to and fro and this gave me a hint as where to place my tripod. Then I mounted my Canon with 100mm Macro lens on the tripod with 580 Ex flash connected through an off the camera chord. Started to shoot making experiments with flash, giving importance to its texture.

As the shot was done after sunset by about 7 PM the background was rendered dark. I decided to continue my shooting tomorrow morning also.

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I got up very early morning by about 5 am and visited the place where it was roosting yesterday. I was so lucky to find it there and waited for the sun to rise up to illuminate the background. I balanced the ambient light with my flash to take the above shot. The camera setting was the same as yesterday and in addition I used a cable release to trigger the shutter as the shutter speed was very low. The colors of the butterfly in both the images do differ from each other as they are lit by different sources.

Lime Butterflies are also known as Lemon butterfly, Citrus Butterfly, Lime swallowtail and Chequered Swallowtail. Their favorite plants are Curry-leaf, Citrus, Radish etc.,

In Tamilnadu, a state in India, has plenty of villages. Some of them are remote even today. Down the centuries, the villagers have a belief that they their villages are being protected by these village Gods known as ” IYANARS”  . (IYANAR is the singular form) from any  enemies such as Diseases  evil spirits, bad thoughts and other stuff like black magic.

These gods are always found at the entrance of the village standing tall and colorful ready to drive away the evil forces.

But these villages are fast vanishing and rural beauty is being lost in the name of development. . its culture and traditions are also fast vanishing ..one can see the buildings and other cluttering things behind, encroaching these statues, marring the pristine beauty  existed once upon a time.  I have added modern structures behind these gods also to indicate the choking Tradition.

The shot was taken near Rasipuram, and  Namakkal, in Tamilnadu.

We were traveling very slowly in our car on the high way connecting Bandipur and Mudumalai sancturies. It was around 12-30 noon and the tigress came out of the lantana bush to our surprise on the left hand side of our car. By the time we realized the presence of the tigress, the car had gone a few meters away. We returned back to the spot and saw the tigress in the bush,  scanning the vicinity. To our further surprise, we saw the cubs behind her a few meters away . They were 3 in numbers.  May be, the Tigress was studying the risk factors of crossing the road with its cubs..