Portsmouth, Hampshire, 16 August 2026
This one's really two shoots in one afternoon. It started indoors, at a tropical butterfly house: warm, humid air, free-flying Owl butterflies and Blue Morphos, a couple of swallowtail species working a tray of pentas, and a Cabbage White that had clearly found its way in from outside. The Owl butterflies were the stars, with huge false eyespots on the underwing that look uncannily like a bird staring back at you, especially side-on with a shallow depth of field. Blue Morphos are the opposite problem: electric blue in flight, then almost invisible the second they close their wings, so the keeper here is a split-second glimpse of that blue sliver.
The second half moved outside into an ornamental garden: roses in half a dozen shades, salvias, asters, sedum, drifts of white gaura nodding in the breeze, and a bed of Perovskia that the bumblebees clearly rated highly. Macro work here is less about the moment and more about patience: waiting for a bee to hover front-on rather than side-on, for a rose to catch the light without wind-blur, for a pair of soldier beetles to hold still on a petal for more than half a second.
Between the two locations it ended up as a decent cross-section of late-summer macro subjects all shot the same afternoon.
