Back in October while on the 2006 NJ Lighthouse Challenge, my son Jon, found this dead Monarch Butterfly on the lawn of the Cape May Lighthouse. It was in nearly perfect condition so I brought it home and placed it in a glass bowl in my china cupboard and forgot about it.

Well on Sunday I was playing with some still life vignettes and when I went into the cupboard I saw the Monarch still in fair shape, a little worn from not being properly preserved, but it was still fairly intact and retained most of its scales and color. So I put the Monarch on the wood shelf and snapped a couple of photos at High ISO with my macro lens.

I was experimenting in low light using high ISO's to see how well my camera can handle high ISO shots under different low light sources. These were shot at 1600, and did pretty well. There was some noise in the shadow and background areas, but really very little and virtually none in the detail of the butterfly's wings. But since I just had installed a new (to me) noise reduction plug-in that I had heard raves over, I decided to apply it and see how it would affect the detail in the Butterfly's wings. I was really quite impressed at the result. In the second photo you can still see the scales, they kind of look like the weave in a fabric which was really interesting to me.

I should mention that the banding you see in the lower part of the top photo is the grain in the oak wood shelf of my cupboard, it's nothing to do with the camera, and not JPEG artifacts. The blue in the corner is the edge of a plate that was in the cupboard. When I shot these I really had no intention of posting them, but today I was looking at them and found them interesting enough to post. So here they are for what it's worth.

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Since some people have asked, I decided I probably should tell you what Noise Reduction Software I used. It's called "Noiseware Pro" by Imagenomic http://www.imagenomic.com/.

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Check out my other Photoblog:
"Parallel Universe"

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