About the Image(s)

I had to go back to the hospital in Dunedin for a day, so my daughter and her children came with me and we all visited the butterflies at the Dunedin museum before returning home. It is not an easy place to shoot - both heat and humidity are kept very high, but the effort is always worth it.
My settings were 219mm, 1/250sec, f/6.3, ISO6400.
I liked this action shot, but not the position of the two butterflies, so I opened in Photoshop to rotate, re-frame and crop the image. I took two layer copies, so I could work on subject and background independently. For the butterflies, I increased contrast and saturation. On the background, I applied a white to transparent gradient with soft light blend mode. I decided the background needed a little softening, so I stamped up, removed the subject and applied a gaussian blur. I masked this and selectively painted in the blur on most of the leaves. lastly, I created a black to white gradient layer with multiply blend mode to darken the lower left hand corner.