July 2020 - Butterflies

Last July – and it’s getting increasingly difficult to think of a time before lockdown and corona virus – we spent a weekend in Stratford upon Avon. A whole mix of my wife’s family came, and we had a couple of lovely days together.

One of the problems we have is that we live in New Malden, and most of our families live in very different parts of the country; so, we don’t get to see them as often as we would like. But we have started a tradition (alright, we’ve done it twice) of meeting up like this in Stratford once a year. 

The weather was lovely, the town was full of people like us – gawping at the theatre, walking through the gardens around Shakespeare’s church, sitting by the river and watching the canal boats go by. Oh, and enjoying eating good food as well!

There is also a Big Wheel, which some of us enjoyed going on, and an absolutely fantastic butterfly farm. My sister in law and her granddaughter and I went around the butterfly farm … in my experience of these places, the butterflies are zipping around and are very difficult to photograph. But here, they were quite happy to welcome all their ‘guests’ and show their glory to us. The farm – it seems the wrong word, but that is what it was called – had a huge variety of butterflies and also had an incubator where you could see the larvae growing in their cocoons, transforming from colourful caterpillars to the rather drab cocoons, and finally pulling themselves out of the cocoon as glorious flying colours.

And they also were very happy to settle down on their visitors. In this picture, my niece has a butterfly perched on the end of her fingers while she was ecstatic with the experience. And the butterfly stayed still long enough for me to take this photograph: I used a fairly small aperture so that I could have the insect in focus, and the child blurred. I reckoned that this would make a more interesting image than everything being sharp. I like the way that this enables you, the viewer, to focus on the main point which is the butterfly resting in the hand of a child. A lovely photo, in my view.