A stunning exotic butterfly

This is a Paris peacock butterfly I photographed in Nepal. The best approach to photographing butterflies is 1) wait until their wings are open to show all the beautiful detail, and 2) make the back of the camera -- i.e. the plane of the digital sensor -- as parallel as possible to the plane of the wings. In this way you maximize depth of field. Since you have to use a telephoto lens to fill a significant part of the frame, and since you'll be shooting from just a few feet away, depth of field is limited. Standing over the butterfly and shooting down on it gives you the parallelism necessary to reveal the important detail with tack sharp clarity. My settings for this image were 1/160, f/11, and 2500 ISO.