My first butterfly

I wandered into the study early this morning to find that a butterfly was trapped in the room and I thought 'Oh great, an opportunity to capture my first butterfly !" Unfortunately the light levels were low particularly when it flew to the the back of the room. It either rested on a white book case at the back or on the edge of the window sill both of which posed tricky exposure problems. Initially I tried to capture it handheld with a 100mm macro lens but even at 400 ASA I was struggling to get sufficient depth of field. I quickly reverted to my tripod but the butterfly did not always play ball by staying still long enough to get a sharp longer exposure especially as I found I needed to use Live View to get a sufficiently accurate manual focus. After something like a twenty minute session, chasing it all over the room I decided it was time to let it free and opened the window. Those of you who regularly take bug pictures will know all this by experience. Maybe I should also have tried using my flash off camera.

However, I eventually did get some shots of it at rest on the window frame which were adequately sharp. However, the back light through one of the wings and the glare from outside made it very difficult to get a good exposure. I had to underexpose quite a bit and then had difficulty in post-processing getting adequate detail especially out of the body section. Whacking the exposure up in raw was not an option as the heavily shadowed areas tended to become too noisy. However, using Lightroom and my Nik plug-ins extensively I was enable me to get one nearly reasonable shot.

I think it is a Tawny Emperor but am open to other identifications as my knowledge in this area apart from cabbage whites is zilch.