Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! A Man After Midnight

This male orange tip may look remarkably like the one I blipped yesterday. There's a reason for that. It's the same butterfly.

We had our fortnightly night out last night. We got home and, as usual, I needed a bit of time to unwind. After it had turned midnight I started thinking about the orange tip that had settled on my globe flower.
I have been wanting some macro shots for a competition and I have never had a tame, sleepy insect so I set up the backdrop and tripod then brought the pot with the trollius and sleepy butterfly onto the dining table. The Man had gone to bed so he couldn't tell me I was being crazy!

It had been so windy yesterday I'd had to use a high ISO to get a fast shutter speed. Indoors I could take shots at 100. I thought I would up my game a little and added extension tubes to give me greater magnification with my 105 macro lens. Yeah, but that lost my electrical control over focusing and aperture. 

Fine! I can manually focus and I can do a range of stacked images to give me the desired depth of field. However, working in the early hours of the morning, having only had a few hours of sleep the night before, meant I didn't get the best of shots for that.

So. Not a very close up shot with the extension tubes, but a crop of a shot with the lens. Works OK for here but can't be blown up big enough for a competition piece.

The thing is, you've just got to keep trying, but I may never, ever, meet another sleepy butterfly!