Painted Lady butterflies seem to be spreading northward, along with the Giant Swallowtails, and three visited the Butterfly Bush at the front window:
The underwing shows four eye spots as distinguishing features:
Painted Ladies have odd-looking “faces” on their front end:
The proboscis works wonderfully well on deeper flowers than these, but they’re not passing anything up:
Another view:
The refueling tube stows neatly for flight:
One had a few notches taken from a wing:
You can’t ask for prettier colors:
These are all hand-held with the DSC-H5 wearing the 1.7 teleadapter, underexposed by 1 stop to keep the dark background from burning out the butterfly colors. The images are very close to dot-for-dot crops from much larger pictures, with a touch of unsharp mask, and no color fiddling at all; bright daylight and a gorgeous subject come out beautifully!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 