Common Blue or Chalkhill Goldie

[Goldie M]

I was on the Cliffs at Dover today when I took this shot of what I thought was a Common Blue, since I got back and put the photo on Computer I found it looked bit like both Goldie

[MikeOxon]

I'd certainly go for Common Blue. There seems to be an overall blue cast on the photo, which has intensified the apparent colour of the butterfly a little. The black spots around the hind wing margins could indicate ab.nigromaculata (which also goes under a variety of other names). There's a photo by Bugboy of a similar specimen on the Species pages of this website.

[Goldie M]

Thanks Mike, yet another ab, my second on this visit to Kent. I'm a bit lost with the Species pages, I tried to find them but for some reason couldn't so gave up. So thanks for putting that bit in about the CB.
I made a big mistake with the camera today, We were suppose to go out for a meal last night and I set the camera to Tungsten Light,( I think that's how you pronounce it) thinking this would get a better photo of us all and used my smaller lens unfortunately
I changed back to my normal lens but didn't change back to Sunny That's why the photo as a blue cast, most of the photos I took were on purple or blue flowers and I liked the cast so kept the shots especially my ones of a very lovely Painted Lady. Thanks again Mike and if you know any tips on the lighting I used please let me Know, you know I like experimenting Goldie

[MikeOxon]

As you say, Goldie, I like experimenting (or playing ) I tried adjusting the colour of your photo in Photoshop (more red, less blue) which I hope has made it more like what you saw:

Usually, I recommend leaving white balance set to 'auto'. The camera gets it right most of the time and it saves you from forgetting to make changes

It is one of the reasons for saving 'RAW' files from a camera, because the colour balance of these can be altered afterwards, when processing the Raw data in a computer. When you take a 'JPEG' image, the camera has already processed the data, according to the settings you chose at the time, and it can be hard to recover the original appearance.

Now that large memory cards are fairly cheap, I set my camera to save both the RAW and JPEG data. I usually just file away the RAW data and use the JPEG version but, if something has gone wrong, I can often recover the situation by re-processing the RAW data. But then, as I said, I like playing with computers...

Mike

[Goldie M]

The photo looks great Mike more like what I saw, I didn't really understand the Raw shots before, but it sounds a good Idea to keep both, you know me I like trying different things, I must admit though I like the blue haze. Goldie