Butterflies by Philip Greenspun

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Frail Travellers, deftly flickering over the flowers;
O living flowers against the heedless blue
Of summer days, what sends them dancing through
This fiery-blossom'd revel of the hours?

Theirs are the musing silences between
The enraptured crying of shrill birds that make
Heaven in the wood while summer dawns awake;
And theirs the faintest winds that hush the green.

And they are as my soul that wings its way
Out of the starlit dimness into morn:
And they are as my tremulous being--born
To know but this, the phantom glare of day.

-- "Butterflies", Siegfried Sassoon, 1920

All of these were taken at Butterfly World in Pompano Beach, Florida (one hour north of Miami) with a Nikon 8008 camera, Nikon 60mm macro lens, off-camera SB-24 flash (held by me), and off-camera SB-23 flash (held by assistant). Note that a 105 macro lens would have been better suited for this kind of work. TTL aperture-priority auto exposure was used in all cases.

All the originals were on Kodak Ektar 25 or Fuji Velvia film, then scanned to PhotoCD and converted to JPEG and FlashPix.