Nectar Dinner

If you're ever stuck for a photo opportunity, you could do a lot worse than your local botanic gardens. Almost every time my wife and I go there with our kids I'm struck at the incredible diversity of both flora and fauna tucked into the space of just a few acres, and sometimes it's difficult not to snap a good picture. When we visited the gardens in October I brought my tried-and-true 50mm lens along with my D7100 and sure enough, I left with a memory card stuffed not only with some nice photos of my family but more than a couple displaying the beauty of nature. Case in point: the monarch butterfly you see above.

When I took this picture my parents were visiting for the weekend, and my dad and I spent several minutes basically crawling around next to some flowerbeds trying to capture pictures of butterflies as they were either flying, resting, or sipping flower nectar. My goal was to capture a photo with all of the following elements:

• A clear shot of a monarch butterfly

• On a fl