Intro / Description

Lukas Nursery is a family owned business in Oviedo, Florida.  You can find all sorts of plants and garden supplies in their well stocked nursery and they also have a small Butterfly Encounter where three of us from the Photography Interest Group  went exploring last Saturday.

We were there when they opened at 9am so we could try to avoid the mid-day heat.  Inside the Butterfly Encounter, they have a nice gift shop where you pay your $5 entrance fee.  When you enter the butterfly area itself, there are a great many beautiful flowers and at least three types of small, colorful birds – but unfortunately there weren’t very many butterflies visible on the day we were there.  I’ve been once or twice in the past when they were more plentiful.  I wonder if this is a seasonal thing or we just caught them in between re-supplies?  We did have fun stalking the butterflies we found and angling for good photos.

Info for Photographers

Photo hints:  This is a good place to practice using your flash.  I tried both the pop-up flash on my camera and an off camera flash triggered by the pop-up.  With flash, you should be able to use a small aperture to increase your depth of field.  If you want to experiment further, you can shoot in manual mode using a shutter speed within your camera’s flash sync range.  Then vary the flash output and your shutter speed / aperture to control the ratio of foreground and background lighting to isolate your subjects.

Tripod/Monopod:  Not prohibited, but there isn’t much room inside for a tripod so you should be polite and bring a monopod at the very most.  In the confined spaces and with my subjects moving around, I left both my tripod and monopod home and hand held all my photos.

Lenses: A longer macro lens will be helpful.  I had some success with my 105mm macro on a crop sensor body.  You may also want to bring one of your longer zoom lenses to get close to butterflies that perch up high in the vines.

Best time to visit:  Avoid the summer – it gets very hot inside.  Think about calling ahead to check on the the butterfly population.

Other:  Don’t forget to look for flower and bird photos too!

Butterfly Encounter Summary

P.S. I re-visited the Lake Jesup Wilderness area this morning and added a few more photos to my Flickr set.  Click here if you’re interested.

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.