Butterfly Haven at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

We visited Chicago this weekend, and one of the highlights of our trip was the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park. There are butterflies released daily after they emerge from their chrysalises. Our own Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati does a wonderful butterfly show each spring, but it has always been very crowded each time I have visited, which makes it a bit more difficult to photograph and just enjoy the peaceful beauty of the butterflies.

Seeing three or four blue morpho butterflies flitting together is really a magical sight. Of course, I could never manage to capture them in the frame with my telephoto lens unless they were obediently still.

I was using the Tamron 150-600mm lens because I thought it would be useful at the zoo afterwards, but the 70-200mm f/2.8 would have been a much better choice. The light was low, since it was a drizzly day, so the maximum aperture of f/6.3 was really limiting. Also, the long minimum focusing distance of the 150-600mm lens meant that I couldn’t get a picture of some of the butterflies that were in tighter places.

However, by bracing myself, I was sometimes able to get reasonably sharp images at speeds of as low as 1/160 seconds at 600mm. I turned my ISO all the way up to 6400 in some cases, but the noise levels actually were not that objectionable in most cases. This might be because the backgrounds were not meant to be smooth gradients of color anyway.

The long focal length also smoothed out the background so the windows weren’t recognizable as such.

There were so many types of butterflies that I hadn’t seen before. There were labeled guide sheets available, but I can’t remember any of the names, even though I tried to memorize them.

There were also tiny, brilliantly colored tropical birds, but most of the time, they were hiding out of sight. I could have easily spent more time waiting for them to come out, but one of the junior members of our party was growing quite restless, so we had to move on. Hopefully we’ll be able to make a return visit next time we are in Chicago, and I’ll make a point to bring the other lens.