Scene on the Road

At home all week taking accumulated use-or-lose vacation days, I was just out for coffee when I noticed a giant wooden butterfly sign and the "there goes that Action News Van" parked alongside the Haddonfield Friends School. I knew immediately I'd stumbled upon the annual parade of Kindergarten "Monarch Butterflies." My kids, who are now both in high school, put on large fabric butterfly wings when they were each in kindergarten, and made the very same "migration" to Mexico, walking in downtown Haddonfield after tagging and releasing the live monarchs they raised from eggs and studied in class. The last time I'd photographed the parade it was as a parent, so I hung around figuring it'd be fun to see if I would shoot it any differently now. What a photographer is thinking about affects their pictures more than the kind or type of camera they use. How each of us approaches a subject in our own way is what makes photography such a form of personal expression. That's where the "Art" part - if you want to call it that - comes from. Even "documentary" journalistic photography leaves a lot of room for individuality. In shooting for the newspaper, I see this in my own work all the time. I can do the same kind of assignment for different sections of the newspaper and will take different kinds of pictures depending on whether they're for business, food, local or features.

Some of the time those differences end up being only how many pictures I take, or how many varieties of the same picture. "How hard am I going to work this?" is a question I try not to ask myself. I like to think I work just as hard for a single image I know will only run one column on an inside page as for a photo layout I hope will carry the entire front of the section.

Beyond the obvious, I wasn't focusing on just one kid - mine - this time. In shooting these butterfly kids I found myself thinking more about showing the group of identical costumes and trying to capture the kids' motion. I didn't stop them and say "look at me," but then I wouldn't do that if I were shooting a newspaper assignment either.

Once I had made the overall photo of the butterflies looking real small as they passed in front of the fire house, I didn't have to keep trying to reshoot that idea. As the kids marched, I tried to shoot from a lower level, at their height to give the pictures more of a sense of immediacy. And as always with kids, it took a look of pictures to get one where they weren't looking at the camera - especially as they pass me crouched down right next to the curb with a camera resting on my knee. Whether it's kids or business people at a cocktail reception, getting your subjects to ignore the camera is the first step to getting the most natural photos . Mostly it just takes time. For the photographer to get into the rhythm of the activity, and for everyone else to get accustomed to the photographer snapping away. It's a lot like nature photography. You stay in one place long enough so the creatures think you're just a part of the scenery.

When the parade was over I ended up back at the school at their Butterfly Peace Garden which has become the central point of the school's environmental education - a patch of Milkweed that Monarch caterpillars need for food and on which to lay their eggs. It is also filled with a butterfly's favorite perennials, so there were still a few of the kids' released monarchs feeding on the flowers. Maybe they were used to being around the kids since their pre-pupation days, or maybe the nectar was so good they didn't care, but I was able to move in close enough to shoot their tagged wings with my macro lens (an otherwise crummy 35-70mm f/2.8 zoom). One of the great things about digital photography is that even basic point-and-shot cameras now have a closeup setting. Moving in closer is one of the best ways to vary your photos. On most cameras it's the little tulip icon that lets you focus on objects within two feet of the lens. Just don't forget to turn the dial back to "A" or whatever, or you'll end up missing photos (like when you leave it on self timer and wonder why the shutter lag is so much longer than usual).

The tags come from Monarch Watch, an educational outreach program based at the University of Kansas. They estimate over 100,000 students and adults participate in tagging activities each fall, and they maintain a website, blog and an e-mail discussion list. Tagged butterflies like the ones from Haddonfield are recovered at the winter roost sites in Mexico, after migrating from all over the United States and Canada. A look at their searchable database shows three Haddonfield-tagged monarch recoveries - including one (Tag Number CHR820) released by the kindergartners in September of 2003 that was found by Umberto Garcia Garcia in El Rosario, Mexico on March 7, 2006.

So I'll be checking there every once in a while to see how Ms. LMU926 (that's her with the fashionable circle tag above) does on her journey. I know it's a she, because one of the first things my kids learned, and the question every kindergartner this day could answer for you was: "What sex is this butterfly?" (males have a black dot on each of its lower wings and females have thicker black vein lines). The other stragglers I photographed in the garden were LMU846, LMU770 and LMU856, another female, at right. She seemed to savor each flower, so I picked her to chase from petal to petal, starring at her on each stop, shooting - and missing - over and over again for so long I started to get light headed, kneeling in the same place, my finger poised for what seemed like an eternity, hoping to catch her in flight with my shutter-lagged Nikon D200. Over the years I have spent an inordinate amount of time waiting to catch balls on tips of fingers, pigeons taking off, leaps from curbs - all those things that help make a "decisive moment." I know they are all just mind games but we all have to do whatever it takes - crossword puzzles, chess, political debate, practice our craft - to stay sharp. It's not just the equipment.