Friday, September 24, 2010

Visit to Bannerghatta Butterfly park

19th, Sept 2010

Last time I had been to Bannerghatta park, to test my sigma 150mm macro lens. Though that trip was satisfying enough, I was not too happy with the butterfly shots. This time around I decided to visit just the Butterfly park and was determined to spend entire day in the butterfly park itself till I get few decent shots.


Entrance to the park

First little bit about the park.
The country's first Butterfly Park was established at the Bannerghatta Biological Park. The Butterfly Park is spread across 7.5 acres (30,000 m2) of land. It comprises a butterfly conservatory, museum and an audio-visual room. The butterfly conservatory has a polycarbonate roof and is a 10,000 sq ft (1,000 m²). circular enclosure, inside which the living environment has been carefully designed to support over 20 species of butterflies (info courtesy wiki)

As usual I started at around 8 AM from home and took a Volvo bus to the park from Majestic. I reached the place at around 9.30 AM. This time I wanted to spend time only in the butterfly park, so I headed directly to the butterfly park. I was the first visitor to the park, and I was pretty happy with that as there will not be any disturbance when I am dating the butterflies :)

On the way to the park, I saw couple of beautiful wild flowers and captured them in my camera. The breeze was constantly moving the flowers and I tried hard to get a decent shot, but all in vain, so I did not waste much time and moved on.


As I entered the enclosure where the butterflies are kept the first ones that I saw were the usual ones - Common castor, Common indian crow (yes this is the name of the butterfly) and Common Mormon. I had captured these guys during previous visit, so this time I wanted to shoot different and more colorful species.

After few minutes of looking around, I saw Red Pierrot flying close to the ground. This guys never flew above couple of feet from the ground. I got couple of decent shots of this species.

Red Perriot

Red Pierrot

While I was still looking for more colorful species, the caretaker approached me and told that he can take me to the place where butterflies are kept before releasing them to the park. He asked for 50 bucks for the favor, which I happily paid as I thought that there might different species over there. Unfortunately when I saw the place, I could see only Indian crow and Common Mormon. Now that I had already paid the caretaker, I spend some time in capturing them.

Common Mormon

I moved back to the park and spent good amount of time trying to get few decent shots of the butterflies. By this time, couple of enthusiastic shutter bugs like me were in the park and were chasing the flutterflies :)

Pioneer

Blue Tiger

I was now looking for some other interesting subject, and I noticed a wasp playing around a flower. So I clicked few frames of it too.

Wasp

Next I saw ants moving around a plant, so got them in too.

Ant

By this time, I was getting tired and was planning to leave. I saw one guy who was a photo enthusiast like me, trying to take butterfly shots from very close distance, but as soon as he got little closer the butterfly would fly off.I had noticed that there were couple of butterflies who where happily basking in sun, and were not moving at all. I showed him the still guys and he shot it to his heart's content. Later on we exchanged our lens, I mounted his Nikon 60mm macro and he tried out my sigma 150mm macro. I must say that Nikon's 60mm macro is real sharp optic, though because of 60mm the working distance is not too flexible which required to get real close to the subject. Another feature of this lens was that it could stop down to f/57 at life size.

He was also carrying nikon 70-300mm lens. I tried out that too. There was one large butterfly flying far off, and the reach of 300mm helped here.

Not sure about ID (Taken at 300 mm)

After shooting for a while with the new lens, we switched to wide angle lens to take some shots of the artificial waterfall that is build in the park. I also photographed a butterfly with the same wide angle lens.

Artificial waterfall in the park

Pionner

Well, by now it was almost 3PM and I was too tired so finally decided to call it a day. Took the bus to Majestic and then home. This trip was comparatively more productive then the previous one. Next thing on my list would be to capture the more enthralling compositions of butterflies along with beautiful flowers and also capture some more varied species of butterflies.

Signing of for now till next trip!!! Leaving you with some of the shots from the trip.

Common grass yellow (not sure)

Pionner








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