Overall Favourite Photo of 2017

[Wurzel]

Overall Favourite Photo of 2017

Week 20 –So here we are we have reached to final post and now becomes the culmination of a winters worth of sorting and selecting…hopefully the new season (which has already started for some) will prove to be fruitful and I look forward to seeing what everyone offers up for this thread next year.

As like last year details of locations, dates, times and circumstances would be welcome as would any accompanying stories and anecdotes or other observations of behaviour and interesting other points.

Have a goodun

Wurzel

[Wurzel]

Overall Fave

I really struggled to choose my overall Fave. It was hard enough selecting my favourites for each species so in the end I succumbed and made the task ever so slightly easier by opting for two...

The first was from my first Welsh trip and covers the behaviour (a doomed courtship) and in flight image types that I like to try for. I love the way the male is hanging in the air while the female is warding him off with her antennae held like horns.

The second is of a Small Pearl and ticks my ‘close up’ and ‘stained glass’ boxes. I’ve been trying for a shot like this for several years but things have never quite panned out. The butterflies were too hot and so active or too cold and so tightly closed up and roosting. If they were basking then they did so horizontally or too low to the ground so even if I lay flat on the ground and twisted my neck to near breaking point I wouldn’t be able to get beneath them. With my closest attempts the angle was slightly off or their were grass blades in the way whereas this…for me it’s pretty much spot on.

Have a goodun

Wurzel

[bugboy]

Well it was definitely a long year for me with countless memorable moments. Should it be the Large Tortoiseshell I came across at the beginning of the year or the QoS at the end? I went to get to Scotland, Ireland and Wales (just) in my travels last year so perhaps one of those encounters would make it to my favourite, but as far as butterflies are concerned I kept coming back to a day late in the season at High and Over when I managed an image I've been trying to get for a while now, my Wall underside shot. I had enough time to take two shots before he shot off and in the interests of variety I kept them both with different crops, and since I've already used the portrait one in the Wall thread here's the squared version

I'm not sure which one I prefer...

Well that was the butterfly fav but there was one more image that I am particularly proud of so my favourite bird picture is this one of a little Egret taken at Two Tree Island in Essex just over a month later

[downland boy]

I chose this photograph as my overall favourite, not because it was better than anything else I took (it wasn't) but because it evokes memories of a great encounter with this lovely butterfly. Early in the Purple Emperor's flight season, I was with Mark Colvin and Bob Eade when we watched this female fly past us and down into a woodland gully. She settled on the bank of a woodland stream to imbibe salts and moisture and remained there for several minutes. We all managed to get similar shots before she then flew off through the trees.


More images from that day at http://eastsussexwanderer.blogspot.co.uk (click on "In Love with iris", July 2017)

[Goldie M]

My overall favourite photo is the shot I took of my very first White Letter Hair Streak , I went all through my shots but kept coming back to this one, I remembered how the Sun seemed to make it glow and bring out it's colours, plus the excitement that I'd actually seen one after a few years of looking for them.Goldie

[Allan.W.]

I was very pleased with this shot of mating Marbles ,I was actually looking for a scarce plant that grows on the site,(Sandling park,near Hythe ) and probably nowhere else in Kent (Confused Eyebright ), and after some searching I managed to find a few plants ,very pleased ! I was also pleased to find a good number of Marbles ,which I wasn,t expecting ,and this was one of two pairs I found on this particular trip
I reckon there were about 60-70 Marbles on the wing ,I,ll definitely be going back ,this season.
Regards Allan.W.

[MikeOxon]

Early in the season, I was 'playing' at taking high-speed sequences of Brimstones feeding on a bed of Primroses at my local Dry Sandford Pit reserve.

I was quite excited by the results and this GiF animation of one of the sequences includes both a good topside shot and shows how the butterfly manages to move from one flower head to another with just one beat of its wings.

Dry Sandford Pit, Oxon - 26th March 2017
Olympus E-M1 with 100-400mm lens (at 156mm) - 1/2000s@f/8 ISO 640

Oh, and it's also a sneaky way of getting 5 photos into one favourite

Mike

[David M]

Not being a serious photographer, my images are evocative for personal reasons, rather for any artistic value.

I suppose I was guilty of just being in the right place at the right time on occasions in 2017. For instance, parking my car in the French Pyrenees in May at an off-road site and suddenly seeing this fresh Cardinal basking on the gravel:

I also derived an abnormally high degree of satisfaction from tracking down one of France's rarest butterflies, Spanish Fritillary. I couldn't get close to it but given its iconic scarcity, even this poor image was sufficient to imbue me with unadulterated pleasure:

In terms of image quality, whilst this is not at all noteworthy, it is, for me, a satisfying shot as it depicts one of my favourite species, Dusky Heath, basking contentedly whilst showing off its truly beautiful underside markings:

[Tony Moore]

Despite all the exotics seen during the year, my favourite has to be this Orange Tip, which appeared in my garden, close to the centre of Stafford, on 10th April. Evocative of spring and promise for the future.

Tony M.

[millerd]

A really tough choice - but one way or another I think that it had to be a Holly Blue. But which one? They were out on my local patch from the end of March until the middle of November... However, this first brood female from 10th May squeaks in ahead of the many many others. Just.

.

The other one I really like is a hutchinsoni Comma from 7th June. This was the first of the brood I had seen and a real sign that summer was underway. This form of the species easily makes up for the lack of fritillaries on my patch and is a glorious sight.

Dave

[Vince Massimo]

Rather than nominating a past favourite from the species list I am going to select a one-off, which is of a Peacock and Small Tortoiseshell egg laying on the same leaf.

Peacock and Small Tortoiseshell - North Stoke, Sussex 11-April-2017

This was a bonus for me because I was actually searching for Large Tortoiseshells.

Vince