Butterflies Day 3, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario
Both of my sons had morning classes at Carleton U., so that was a convenient reason for me to load camera gear back into the car and drive them down to the University. Of course, the butterfly display played no role in that decision :-). I got into the greenhouses shortly after nine and since it was a weekday and a scheduled group of school children didn’t show up for the first tour slot, I, and a couple of other photographers had plenty of space to do our thing.
The first two days, I was experimenting with a Nikon 180 mm f2.8 lens with or without a Nikon 5T on front for the macro shots.(see blog entries for October 2nd & 3rd).
Today, I selected my much older MF Nippon Kogaku Micro-Nikkor 55mm f3.5 lens. Since this lens has a shorter focal length and is completely manual, using this lens required a completely different approach and a few new challenges. I also had a polarizing filter on the front and that also yielded a variety of outcomes.
The butterflies weren’t the only colourful things in the greehouses today. At least one little girl was all decked out in her butterfly wings and sequined butterfly mask just waiting for Hallowe’en to arrive.
About the lens: The lens that I used for today’s shots is a Nippon Kogaku Micro-Nikkor 55mm f3.5 lens manufactured in the mid 1960’s. It is a manual focus lens but very easy to focus with the big focusing ring. The scalloped focusing ring is an interesting feature which was replaced by a diamond hatched lower profile focusing ring in later models. I purchased the lens used. Although not really common, various iterations of this lens come up for sale on ebay from time to time and are totally compatible with the pro and prosumer lines of Nikon DSLRs. It is my understanding, however, that it is not totally compatible with some of Nikon’s consumer level DSLRs. I’ve only used it on my Nikon D200 and D300 and it works fine on those bodies.
More of my butterfly blogs:
Carleton Butterfly Show – Day 1
Carleton Butterfly Show – Day 2
Carleton Butterfly Show – Day 4
Carleton Butterfly Show – Day 5
Carleton Butterfly Show – weekend crowd
Hi Ron,
Fabulous shots! You did a really nice job on these. You must shoot with a macro, it’s definitely my next buy for my slr!
Jill
PS – I met you today – the girl in the masks Mommy! 🙂
Thanks Jill. Your daughter’s mask and butterfly wings certainly added a nice twist to the exhibit. Hope she has good weather for Hallowe’en.
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