(Post by JUERGEN ROTH)

Exploring a local wildlife sanctuary can be both rewarding and beneficial for photographers. Usually one can find birds, beautiful flowers, or insects of all sorts as willing and fascinating objects.

My last local photo tour brought me back to the Mass Audubon Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester, Massachusetts. The sanctuary is a short fifty-five minute drive west of Boston. It has lots of trails to explore, a beaver pond, and a butterfly garden at the main building and entrance. I stayed put at the garden and had to pick a lens for my photography. That day the macro lens for insects won over the long lens for hummingbird photography and I followed my quest for flower and insect macro photography.

Impatient for some reason, I dismissed my usual playbook and handheld the camera most of the time. Increasing the ISO setting from 100 to 200 upped the shutter speed significant thereby raising the odds for a sharp, high quality pictures. There were mostly bees going about their business and a couple of butterflies stopped briefly to tease me; in fact not staying long enough to capture any photo of them … frustrating indeed.

A skipper moth on the other hand was more photogenic and posed a few times for me and my camera on a purple coneflower. A good photo opportunity always arises when a butterfly or skipper moth inserts its proboscis coiled tube through which nectar and fluids are imbibed, into the flower and sucks the floral nectar. This is the decisive moment when we focus on the head and eye of the insect and fire away.

Taking about 45 pictures that day resulted in 3 or 4 useable and sellable photographs. Two of them were added to this nature photography blog post. The aperture for the first picture above was set to f/8 resulting in an exposure time of 1/125 seconds.

Juergen Roth,  Brookline, Massachusetts

Juergen Roth was born and raised near Cologne, Germany. In 1988, he moved to Berlin West and following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 he enjoyed exploring the reunited city and the lost natural environment surrounding it. Some of his Berlin photographs were shown with other photographers’ work in a local show. After a number of visits to New York City, Juergen had his own exhibition of New York photographs in Berlin. Since 2001 he has been living in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife Helen and daughter Nina. Juergen has been participated in many local events and shows. His award winning photography artwork has been shown in exhibits and galleries throughout the Northeast and has been published in books, calendars and magazines. Juergen finds inspiration in the beautiful landscapes of New England’s’ National and State Parks/Forests. Juergen has always regarded nature as the ultimate inspiration. For more information, check out his website or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.