Category: Photography

What if famously mono, celebrity photographer David Bailey had opted for moths over models?

This is a Spruce Carpet, so-called because its larvae like spruce trees and its patterning reminded the 18th-century naturalists of the beautiful patterns of carpets (fairly novel and a grand status symbol at the time).

David Bailey is a well-known British photographer who gained fame in the 1960s for his iconic portraits of celebrities and models. He was born in 1938 in Leytonstone, London. He left school at the age of 15 and worked as a freelance photographer for various publications before being hired by British Vogue in 1960.

Bailey’s style was characterized by his use of high-contrast black and white photography and his ability to capture his subjects’ personalities in a candid and intimate way. His subjects included many of the most famous people of the era, such as The Beatles, Mick Jagger, The Kray Twins, Andy Warhol, and Catherine Deneuve.

In addition to his work for Vogue, Bailey also worked for other publications such as The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, and The Face. He also became known for his work in advertising, shooting campaigns for brands such as Burberry, Sony, and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Bailey’s personal life has been marked by a series of high-profile relationships. He was married to the actress Catherine Deneuve for a short time in the 1960s, and later married the model Marie Helvin. He has also been linked romantically to many other famous women, including Penelope Tree and Jean Shrimpton.

Throughout his career, Bailey has received numerous awards and honours for his work, including being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, CBE, in 2001. He continues to work as a photographer today and has also directed several films and documentaries.

Overall, David Bailey is considered one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, and his iconic images continue to be admired and emulated by photographers around the world.

When the first Orange Tip of the garden year turned up just moments ago, I grabbed the nearest camera and rattled off a quick burst when it landed briefly on a wildflower (weed) in the garden. Pre-programmed settings on a Canon 7dii with a Sigma 150-600mm lens pulled to 600mm.  1/1600s, f/8.0, auto ISO jumped to 1600. No chance to do any bracketing or exposure compensation, before this male had flown. So, thank goodness for shooting in RAW.

RAW mode saves all the data your camera’s sensor detects. There’s no processing in the camera, you have to pull the RAW file into appropriate software and convert it to a format that you can then edit with a photo editor. In this case, I opened the native RAW importing component of PainShop Pro. This, like almost all other RAW software, lets you choose the exposure compensation after the fact so that blownout whites like one would get with an Orange Tip butterfly can be rescued.

So, as you can see in the above before and after shot, I’ve set exposure compensation (highlight recovery, they call it in this software) to “normal” and it’s rescued some of the blownout details of the white part of the butterfly’s wing. RAWTherapee, Lightroom, and other tools let you do more sophisticated imports of RAW files. And, you can rescue the blacks too and then create a pseudo-bracketed shot or even an HDR if you wish with some software.

Once some rescue work has been done, I’ll usually then apply a few different adjustments to levels, clarity, vibrancy, and sharpness, as well as cropping and adding my logo.

Regular readers will hopefully be well aware by now that I got bitten by the mothing bug three years ago. Mrs Sciencebase spotted an enormous Copper Underwing in the garden and we were both fascinated by its size and its markings.

A friend in the village had previously offered to lend me his scientific moth trap with its UV tube and so I gave him a call and he said he would set it up that night in his garden. I could come to see what had turned up the next morning (24th July 2018). There were lots of moths in there with some weird and wonderful names – Angle Shades, Poplar Hawk-moth, Willow Beauty, Dark Arches, Burnished Brass, Ruby Tiger, Buff Ermine…the list goes on.

I was hooked and took the trap home and have been “lighting up” ever since. My “tick list” is fast approaching 400 moth species. I’ve photographed them all at least once and some of them several times. You can see my latest moth photos on the Sciencebase Instagram along with my other nature photos and other stuff. My ticklist is on my Imaging Storm website along with an archive of the Lepidoptera photos.

They do say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but you cannot deny that the insect world is beautiful and nowhere more so, in my opinion than in the realm of the Lepidoptera. Incidentally, butterflies are just one group within Lepidoptera, on the same branch of the family tree as the so-called micro moths, in fact.