I love the color orange, and I think I like it best in nature. The changing leaves, warm sunset, or brilliant wing of a butterfly is simply stunning. I saw this monarch on my porch yesterday and it was still there this morning. It doesn’t seem to be doing well and if my quick research is correct it should be on it’s way down to Mexico for the winter instead of hanging around New York. Since it decided to stay and live it’s last days on my porch, I brought out my camera and macro lens to photograph it’s intricate beauty.

While I could easily get sentimental and philosophical thinking about this butterfly, I will leave that for another blog post when I have hours to write and rewrite my thoughts. Until then enjoy these few images, and let me know if you would like a limited edition print of your own by commenting below on this post, commenting on facebook, or replying @marydaph on twitter. I will choose a recipient from each to have their choice of print from these four tomorrow at noon.

Here’s a little snapshot from this morning that I couldn’t help but share. The temp really dropped last night, and this morning there was a nice little coating of frost on my car. Doesn’t it look so much more interesting at the macro level? To do this, I had my camera on manual (of course), used a large aperture so that there would only be a small area in focus and got as close as possible to focus at the macro level with the lens I had on. If you have a camera with automatic settings, there probably is a macro setting on your camera (usually a flower) that will allow you to focus at a very close range and do something similar- the large aperture however creates the blur in the foreground and background. enjoy!