In preparation for an upcoming “Let’s Grow Together” episode for Covington's Nursery (where I teach people how to configure their yards and gardens to attract birds, bees, and butterflies!! 🦜🐝🦋), we went up to the Texas Discovery Gardens to get b-roll we needed of various butterflies flitting about and doing… you know, just doing butterfly things. 🤪🦋😍

🎥 While my friend and producer Eric Johnson recorded the video we needed for the episode, I took the opportunity to flex my photography muscle a bit. There is something very PURIST about photographing butterflies, and I felt a bit like I was back in film school at SMU— where we’d sometimes get an assignment requiring us to simply film something beautiful, in a beautiful and artistic way, for no other reason than just to be beautiful.

If you live near Dallas and have never been to the Texas Discovery Gardens, you should really check it out. It’s delightful and not very crowded, and in my opinion, a great place for any nature photographer to work on honing their craft while simultaneously photographing a beautiful (but very fast moving) subject.

Also, as you can see, I found the lighting in this space to be very exciting, and ideal for some dramatic experimentation. 🤩

📸 The lens I had with me from a previous shoot was my “Portrait Lens” (and not my “Africa Lens” lol), but I made it work and shot all this on a canon 70-200. 📸

🎶 The music is an original piece I composed and performed a few years back for a completely different purpose, but I thought it worked here nicely. 🎶

🦋🌟🦋🌟🦋🌟🦋🌟🦋🌟🦋🌟

🦜🐝🦋 And hey —if you want to watch my episode about the “Best Plants for Attracting Pollinators to your Landscape!” here it is! 🦋🐝🦜