Butterflies are hard to photograph. Statues? Easy.
It has been raining in Vienna for more than a week. Vienna is a lovely city in the rain–it gives inhabitants a good excuse to sit in cafes, drinking milky coffee and eating cake, and, as these are two of my very favorite activities, I’ve been enjoying myself thoroughly. Of course, Vienna is also home to some amazing museums, most housed in exquisite palaces. The Klimt paintings are probably the most famous, and they deserve to be–you simply can’t imagine how beautiful they are in person, delicately adorned in gold leaf. And this afternoon I’m off to the Folk Museum to see a collection of masks from around the world. This counts as working on the book, since African tribal traditions play a key role in the second half. And that’s just as well, because I continue to be bogged down in the increasingly fat middle of the book.
But last weekend I visited one of Vienna’s more unusual collections: Emperor Franz Joseph’s Butterfly House. It’s part of an enormous greenhouse, so the tropical warmth was quite welcome to me, a more-or-less native Tennessean.
I soon discovered that, pretty as they are, butterflies are very difficult to photograph. I already knew that the easiest way to tell a butterfly from a moth is that butterflies usually fold their wings closed when they land, and moths don’t. Some of the butterflies we saw had wings that were interesting on both sides. The morpho richardius has an iridescent blue strip on the outside, and watching one sail through the air can make your breath catch in your throat. When they land, you see the grey and black mottling with a pale yellow owl eye–creepy, but beautiful in its own way.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a single really great picture of one of them. But here’s the best I could do:
One of the lovely schmetterlings from the Schmetterling House
