Plain Tiger Butterfly (Danais chrysippus)

On that Sunday afternoon, weather was very hot and sultry. Pre-monsoon clouds were gathering on the horizon. The place I was trying to photograph was windy and deserted. I was lugging my heavy rig consisting of Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM + Canon EF 2X II Extender mounted on my Canon EOS 5D Mark III body. If you have read my earlier blog you will notice that I use this rig for both bird photography as well as macro photo. I was carrying it using my trusted Benro C45T Carbon Fiber Monopod for support. Today I wanted to try 300mm with 2X convertor as I found 300 and 1.4x was a little too short for birds on full frame camera like 5D Mark III. I was not sure of the quality it will render as 2X magnification supposed to deteriorate the sharpness of any prime it is put on. Even though 300mm f/2.8 was razor sharp I was not sure how it will fare when converted to effective focal Length of 600 mm at f/5.6 using the 2X converter.

Plain Tiger Butterfly (Danais chrysippus)

Unfortunately I could not find any birds that day. All seems to be hiding in shade from the blistering heat. After a long search I spotted a Plain Tiger butterfly (Danais chrysippus) basking on a dry shrub. Lighting was not optimal. I had bright sun sharp and high up in the sky. The folded wings of the butterfly look better if they were nicely side-lit. Unfortunately I was not carrying my flash along with me with which I could illuminate it. I searched for a bright object that could throw some light on the butterfly. I found a piece of old news paper in the nearby garbage bin and used it as a reflector to get as much light as possible on the body of the butterfly. As you can see the results of 300mm f/2.8 are really sharp even after using 2.0x tele-convertor. All these photos are slightly cropped so as to eliminate the surrounding shrubs. I used f/8 aperture as that was the sharpest aperture I found using this combo.

Plain Tiger Butterfly (Danais chrysippus)

The Plain Tiger (Danais chrysippus) is a medium sized butterfly with a wingspan of about 7–8 cm. The body is black with many white spots. The wings are tawny the upper side being brighter and richer than the underside. The apical half of the fore wing is black with a white band. The hind wing has 3 black spots around the center. The hind wing has a thin border of black enclosing a series of semicircular white spots. Background color and extent of white on the forewings varies somewhat across the wide range. The male Plain Tiger is smaller than the female, but more brightly colored. Male Plain Tiger has a pouch on the hindwing. This spot is white with a thick black border and bulges slightly. It is a cluster of specialized scent scales used to attract females. They also possess two brush-like organs which can be pushed out of the tip of the abdomen.

The range of the Plain Tiger extends from Africa and southern Europe, eastwards via Sri Lanka, India, and Myanmar to China and Sulawesi. It is a very common species. This butterfly is perhaps the commonest of Indian butterflies and is a familiar sight to practically everyone on the subcontinent. It flies from dawn to dusk, frequenting gardens, sipping from flowers and, late in the day, fluttering low over bushes to find a resting place for the night. As usual for diurnal butterflies, this species rests with its wings closed. When basking it sits close to the ground and spreads its wings with its back to the sun so that the wings are fully exposed to the sun’s rays.

Plain Tiger Butterfly (Danais chrysippus)

The Plain Tiger is protected from attacks due to the unpalatable alkaloids ingested during the larval stages. The butterfly therefore flies slowly and leisurely, generally close to the ground and in a straight line. This gives a would-be predator ample time to recognize and avoid attacking it. Inexperienced predators will try attacking it, but will learn soon enough to avoid this butterfly as the alkaloids in its body cause vomiting. The butterfly also has a tough, leathery skin to survive such occasional attacks. When attacked it fakes death and oozes nauseating liquid which makes it smell and taste terrible. This encourages the predator to release the butterfly quickly. The Plain Tiger thus has the ability to recover “miraculously” from predator attacks that would kill most other butterflies.

The protection mechanisms of the Plain Tiger, as of the other danaines, and indeed of all colorful unpalatable butterflies, result in predators learning this memorable aspect at first hand. Predators soon associate the patterns and habits of such butterfly species with unpalatability to avoid hunting them in future. This advantage of protection has led to a number of edible butterfly species, referred to as “mimics”, evolving to resemble inedible butterflies, which are referred to as the “model”. The resemblance is not only in color, shapes, and markings, but also in behavioral and flight patterns. This form of mimicry – where an edible species mimics an inedible species – is known as Batesian mimicry.

Plain Tiger Butterfly (Danais chrysippus)

The mimics can resemble the models very closely. The Plain Tiger is specifically mimicked by the following butterflies:

• Indian Fritillary (Argyreus hyperbius) females
• Danaid Eggfly (Hypolimnas misippus forma inaria) females.
• Leopard Lacewing (Cethosia cyane) males and females
• Indian Tamil Lacewing (Cethosia nietneri mahratta) males and females
• Common Palmfly (Elymnias hypermnestra) females

Loten's Sunbird

I found this male Loten’s Sunbird in my garden feeding on nectar from double orange hibiscus(Hibiscus rosa-sinensis) flower. I photographed it using Canon EOS 5D Mark III using Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM combined with Canon EF 1.4x III Extender. All the photos were shot handheld at 1/640th of second shutter speed at f/4.0 aperture. Bird was in close proximity and as it was quite familiar with my presence gave me a great pose. If I had used smaller aperture I would have got the flower in the foreground and the bird also in full focus. But I also would have got the cluttered branches the background. I used the largest aperture available with my lens & TC combo (f/4.0) as the hibiscus plant was quite overcrowded with branches and I wanted to throw all those other branches in the background out of focus. Large telephoto range I had also helped me to get the background blur I wanted.

Loten's Sunbird

The Loten’s Sunbird or otherwise known as Long-billed Sunbird, Cinnyris lotenius is one of a group of very small sunbird which feed largely on nectar. Sunbirds will also take insects, especially when feeding young and Loten’s Sunbird is possibly more insectivorous than other sunbird species. Their flight is fast and direct on their short wings. Long bill separates this from the more common Purple Sunbird (Cinnyris asiaticus). The wings are browner and the maroon breast band is visible on the male under good lighting. The call is distinctive and they are also very active often bobbing their head while foraging. Loten’s Sunbird is found only in peninsular India and Sri Lanka. The main region is along the Western Ghats and into the southern peninsula. There are scattered records from central India and into the northern Eastern Ghats near Orissa. Race hindustanicus is found in India while the nominate race is found in Sri Lanka.

Loten's Sunbird

The song of the male is a long repeated wue-wue-wue… with the last notes accelerated. The males may sing from the tops of bare trees or telegraph wires. Loten’s Sunbird is a resident breeder that is locally common in forest and cultivation in south India and Sri Lanka. Two eggs are laid in a suspended nest in a tree. The bag of webs, bark and caterpillar frass. Salim Ali notes that the species is exceptional among Indian sunbirds in not having cobwebs on the exterior. Loten’s Sunbirds are small, only 12-13 cm long. They have long down-curved bills and brush-tipped tubular tongues, both adaptations to their nectar feeding. The bill lengths vary across populations with long bills found in Sri Lanka.

Loten's Sunbird

The adult male is mainly glossy purple with a grey-brown belly. It is similar to Purple Sunbird, but is larger, has a longer sickle-shaped bill, and a different belly colour. The eclipse male has yellow-grey upperparts, darker than Purple Sunbird, and a yellow breast with a blue central streak extending to the belly. The female has yellow-grey upperparts and yellowish underparts, but lacks Purple’s faint supercilium. The call is a buzzy zwick zwick.

Full Frame Image showing Crop Factor

I have covered the topic of cropping in my earlier blog here. Today I want to talk on Crop factor. The film SLR camera manufacturers when shifting to digital, found it was quite expensive to produce sensor which was the size of the 35 mm film. What they resorted was to produce a smaller sensor than the 35mm film size. Advanced Photo System (APS) was at that a film format which was 24mm wide and they adapted that name and called it APS-C sensors. C stands for “Classic” format of APS film which was 25.1 × 16.7 mm with an aspect ratio of 3:2 Most DSLRs on the market have nominally APS-C-sized image sensors, smaller than the standard 36 × 24 mm (35 mm) film frame. For example, many Canon DSLRs use an APS-C sensor that measures 22.2 mm × 14.8 mm. The result is that the image sensor captures image data from a smaller area than a 35 mm film SLR camera would, effectively cropping out the corners and sides that would be captured by the 36 mm × 24 mm full-size film frame.

5D Mark III 1.6x Crop

The terms crop factor and focal length multiplier is used to help 35 mm film format SLR photographers understand how their existing ranges of lenses would perform on these APS-C cameras which had sensors smaller than the 35 mm film format, but often utilized existing 35 mm film format SLR lens mounts. Using an focal length multiplier of 1.6, for example, a photographer might say that a 50 mm lens on his DSLR “acts like” its focal length has been multiplied by 1.6, by which he means that it has the same field of view as a 80 mm lens on the film camera that he is more familiar with. Of course, the actual focal length of a photographic lens is fixed by its optical construction, and does not change with the format of the sensor that is put behind it.

Common Kingfisher

For most DSLR cameras, crop factor varies from 1.3–2.0.

• 2.0X — Four Thirds system
• 1.7X — Sigma DP1, Sigma DP2, Sigma SD15, Sigma SD14, Sigma SD10, Sigma SD9, Canon EOS DCS 3
• 1.6X — Canon EOS 7D, 500D (T1i/X3), 550D (T2i/X4), 600D (T3i/X5), 60D, 50D, 1000D, 1100D, 40D, 400D, 30D, 450D, 20Da, 350D, 20D, 300D, 10D, D60, D30
• 1.54X — Pentax K20D, Pentax K-7, Pentax K-5
• 1.53X — Pentax *istD, Pentax *istDs, Pentax *istDs2, Pentax *istDL, Pentax *istDL2, Pentax K100D, Pentax K100D Super, Pentax K10D, Pentax K200D
• 1.52X — Sigma SD1, Sigma SD1 Merrill, Sigma DP1 Merrill, Sigma DP2 Merrill, all Nikon DSLR cameras except the full-frame D3, D3s, D3x, D4, D700, and D800; all Fuji, Sony (except for the full-frame Alpha 850, Alpha 900), newer Pentax DSLRs (K-m, K-x and K-r), and Konica Minolta DSLR cameras.
• 1.3X — Canon EOS-1D Mark IV, 1D Mark III, 1D Mark II (and Mark II N), Kodak DCS 460, DCS 560, DCS 660, DCS 760, Leica M8, M8.2

Purple Moorhen

In a cropped camera like Canon EOS 7D for example a 28 mm lens delivers a moderately wide-angle field of view on a 35 mm format full-frame camera, but on a camera with a 1.6 crop factor, an image made with the same lens will have the same field of view that a full-frame camera would make with a 45 mm lens (28 × 1.6 = 44.8). This narrowing of the field of view is a disadvantage to photographers when a wide field of view is desired. Ultra-wide lens designs become merely wide; wide-angle lenses become ‘normal’. However, the crop factor can be an advantage to photographers when a narrow field of view is desired. It allows photographers with long-focal-length lenses to fill the frame more easily when the subject is far away. A 300 mm lens on a camera with a 1.6 crop factor delivers images with the same field of view that a 35 mm film format camera would require a 480 mm long focus lens to capture.

Purple Heron

Compared to the full-frame format (size equivalent to 35mm film), APS-C sensors offer some advantages and disadvantages. SLRs with APS-C sensors are considerably cheaper than full-frame cameras. They are also lighter and smaller. Apart from these differences, there are two other important factors. The first is image quality. Theoretically, a larger sensor produces a better image, i.e. one with more detail and less noise. In practice, the difference may not be obvious and may depend on the use of a high quality lens and on the photographer’s skill. The other difference is the smaller field of view. Let me take my Canon EOS 5D mark III and Canon EOS 7D and compare the result. 5D mark III has full frame sensor (size equivalent to 35mm film) and 7D has 1.6 crop factor(size 1.6 times smaller than 35mm film). The smaller APS-C sensor of 7D effectively minimizes the field of view by about 1.6, so that a 300mm lens has the same field of view as a 450mm lens on a 35mm. It is important to note that there is no magnification benefit, only a smaller field of view.

Purple Heron

Let us try another experiment. If I use crop on my 5D mark III picture by a factor of 1.6 what will be the resultant effect? Is it better than 7D or bad? The only way we can test is to find out the total amount of pixels the resultant picture produces. 5D Mark III produces an image 5760 x 3840 = 22118400 or 22 Mega Pixels. If I crop that by 1.6, I get 3600 x 2400 = 8640000 or 8 Mega pixel image. This is almost the size I used to get on my older Canon EOS 40D camera. 7D on the other hand even with its smaller sensor produces 5184 x 3456 = 17915904 or 18 mega pixel photo, so effectively the cropped sensor of 7D is able to produce larger mega pixel photo than 5D mark III. I want to clarify here that I am in no way telling more mega pixel is better. In fact if canon produce a full frame sensor out of 7D’s pixel pitch, it will be around 18 X 1.6 X 1.6 = 46 mega pixels. Please also note that as they cram more and more mega pixels into a sensor the quality of the photo starts dropping and noise increases after a certain amount of mega pixels. We are still not sure what that figure is. But these calculation prove us that 7D is a better camera for a bird photographer as it produces larger mega pixel photo than cropping equivalent amount on 5D mark III. You will be able to get a better crop of the bird on 7D than on 5D mark III except the quality of picture from 5D mark III will be far superior than that from that from 7D.

I thank my good friend Shiva Shankar for lending me his 7D to test while he was testing my 5D Mark III for bird photography. He was also the inspiration behind this article.