Here’s my favorite picture from my trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway: a cloudless sulphur butterfly. There’s nothing special about the butterfly itself, but I was lucky enough to catch it in flight, perfectly focused with the wings frozen by a shutter speed of 1/5000th of a second. The curlicue antenna and the gorgeous flame azaleas top it all off. I love this picture.
The second picture was taken a tenth of a second and half a wing-beat later. In this one, the butterfly looks a bit like a queen in a huge robe, mysterious and imperial. I like it too.
UPDATE: In comments, Joel Hanes tells me that the curlicue is a feeding tube, not an antenna. I sort of figured something like this had to be the case, since the butterfly already had the regulation two antennae.
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