Mario Bautista
An Eastern Black Swallowtail second instar caterpillar defecates as it rests on a piece of parsley in Lancaster on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024.
For those of you who follow along with the weekly Viewfinders, you might remember last year I captured a colorful image of an Eastern black swallowtail in its fifth instar stage. Today’s Viewfinder is of another swallowtail going through the second instar phase.
I’ve been watching these critters for the last month or so as they try to annihilate my parsley plants. I don’t have the heart to get rid of them, but they trashed my food last year and I didn’t want to lose my crop again.
So, when I find one no matter the stage, I remove it from my plant by snipping the branch on which it lives and pull more shoots for it to eat. I then place it in a safe area away from my crop. I believe they have been doing well as I’ve had many visitors this summer.
It was amusing to me that as I was shooting this character, it defecated a pile of green parsley. I couldn’t figure out why it was rutching around so much, but I wondered if this is how it gets that part of its system moving. Either that, or it was trying to get comfortable again as it continued feasting.
THE METHOD: This image was made with a Nikon D6 body and a 105 micro lens. The ISO was set at 1600, the shutter speed was 1/25th of a second and the f-stop was set to f-16. As much as I hate them, a tripod was used to enable a sharp image. A speed light was employed via bouncing the light from a light gray shed that was behind the subject. This helped to fill in the shadows. The image was processed with Skylum software. I selected 20 each of saturation and vibrance, 20 accent AI and 15 structure from the filter packs that are available. I then cleaned up some dust spots and performed dodging and burning, along with cropping the photo in Photoshop.
Through the Viewfinder is a weekly feature by LNP | LancasterOnline photographers exploring the art of black-and-white and color photography.
