Canon 70D, Sigma 18-255mm lens, 212mm focal length, 200 ISO, f14, 1.6". In photoshop I pulled down the blacks and nudged the vibrance only a little then cropped it way down to fit here on Steemit.
I'm not a entomologist , but I always understood it to be that you can tell the difference between a butterfly and a moth by how they hold their wings when they rest. Moths rest with their wings open, butterflies with their wings closed.
And, this, too is how they die. We have no shortage of bugs here in Costa Rica, including an obscene amount of butterflies and some really beautiful moths. So beautiful, in fact, that they could easily pass for butterflies so it's good to know how to tell the difference.
It must be the season for these particular butterflies, they are aloft all around my house, so many that we are finding them dead all over. On the open part of it's wings, this butterfly has the colors of a Monarch, if not quite as intricate of a pattern. But, being a butterfly, it died with it's wings closed, and here is where the real story is. How intricately beautiful! How easily over looked. It's almost like this butterfly is, like me, an introvert and only shows how truly magnificent it is when it's at rest.
This was a challenging photo to take. I wanted to get all the details of the pattern, the colors and the hair on it's chest. So I closed my aperture super tight to increase my depth of field and lowered my ISO to 200. But because I shot this indoors, even though I was next to a sunny window, I had to put my camera on the tripod and shoot a long shutter speed at 1.6". Even pressing the shutter with a 2 second delay caused too much movement in the camera, so I set a 10 second delay and then walked away from it. This seemed to give me the detail that I needed.