This article shares a selection of tiny sensor butterfly macro photographs captured handheld with an Olympus TG-5 using its microscopic mode.

These photographs were captured a few years ago during a visit to the Niagara Butterfly Conservatory.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

Since the butterflies are born and raised at the facility they are a lot more acclimatized to people.

This makes most of them less skittish and more approachable than butterflies found in the wild.

It also makes it much easier for a photographer to find subject butterflies, look for decent lighting in the facility, and adjust their shooting angle without scaring butterflies away.

I enjoy getting in very close to my subjects when capturing macro images, so the close focusing ability of the TG-5 suits my photographic style.

I also enjoy incorporating some of the environment in my butterfly images as it can help to provide context.

When capturing tiny sensor butterfly macro images it can be challenging to find an appropriate shooting angle where the background is distant enough to be blurred. When you compare the image above with the two that follow, you can see the advantage of getting in tighter to the subject in terms of creating background blur.

Photographing at a facility like the Niagara Butterfly Conservatory provides photographers with the opportunity move in extremely tight to subjects. For many of the photographs that follow, my TG-5 was so close to the subject butterflies that they were only few centimetres away from touching the front of my camera.

The Niagara Butterfly Conservatory is one of my favourite photographic locations, and I look forward to a post-COVID time when I can once again visit safely.

The Olympus TG-5 was my first ever Olympus camera. I was very pleasantly surprised with the image quality that it could produce, and the innovative technology (like the microscopic mode) packed into it. It was the TG-5 that made me curious about other Olympus products and prompted me to investigate further.

Technical Note

Photographs were captured hand-held using camera gear and technology as noted in the EXIF data. Images were produced from RAW files using my standard process. All photographs are displayed as full frame captures without any cropping.

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