Moth Trapping

Maria was kind enough to buy me a Moth trap recently.  It's a simple UV light over a white canvas box that I can run overnight in the garden.  The moths are attracted to the light and hide in the box, tucked away in egg boxes till morning.  Come the dawn I close the trap down, have some breakfast and then investigate the contents (if any).

Obviously my main objective is to photograph any moths that are lured to the light.  Many settle on the white canvas of the trap or on a white backdrop behind the light box and can be photographed in situ.  Fine for record keeping but hardly creative, the weave of the canvas or backdrop failing to add anything to the image, no matter how beautiful the moth.  For example, this shot of a Jersey Tiger, Euplagia quadripunctaria, doesn't do the moth justice.

Better to display the moths in a more attractive, natural looking setting.  

Fortunately many moths are torpid in the morning after the trap is opened.  Although some do immediately fly away many others can be coaxed onto a finger or a suitable twig and then moved onto a more photogenic environment.  This Buff Ermine, Spilosoma luteum, happily sat on my finger and could then be transferred onto some dead tree fern fronds for photography.

Sometimes the transfer is to a leaf or leaves, as with this Poplar Hawk Moth, Laothoe populi...

...or onto a twig, as with this male Four-spotted Footman, Lithosia quadra.

The objective is always to produce an uncluttered shot with a natural looking background ro set off the moth. One complication is that I'm shooting with my STF-8 twin macro flash and the Olympus 60mm macro so the light fall off behind the subject is fairly swift.  Hence I use a pale green background, which darkens a little with the light fall off to produce a pleasing neutral background for many shots.

I've even set up a little studio scene for outdoor use which gives me a number of scenic options.  It's only a couple of branches and some interesting stones housed in a small planter with the backdrop behind but the results are looking good.

Here's a Knot Grass moth, Acronicta rumicis on one of the branches...

...while a Square-spot Rustic, Xestia xanthographa, sits happily on another...

...and a Black Arches, Lymantria monacha, perches happily on the stone.

I've only managed a few trapping sessions so far and am limited to shooting only in my Plymouth garden, restricting the range of species that are likely to be attracted to the trap, but already it's proving very satisfying in photographic terms and it gives me an idea of what's around.  Different moths have different flight times so it will be fascinating to see the range as the seasons roll around.

A final word.  All shooting was outdoors and all moths were released unharmed into thick vegetation after shooting.  None were additionally cooled or stunned.  They could - many did - fly away before I got the chance to shoot them but that's all part of the requirements for ensuring their ethical treatment.

Olympus 8-25mm f4 Pro

I mentioned in my January post on the Panasonic 9mm f1.7 that, although I liked the lens for it's sharpness and light weight I was not too impressed by the noticable chromatic aberration in high contrast shots.  I also said that my preferred option would have been the Olympus 8-25mm f4 Pro lens but the budget wouldn't stretch to that.

Now it has.  Thanks to an unbelievable one time Amazon offer I snapped up a new 8-25mm for £570, significantly less than the price for a well used example.  It arrived yesterday and I had a brief window in the evening (after my cooking and kitchen cleaning duties!) to take some shots in the garden.

Shots including these:

Shot against the evening light at 8mm handheld, with light bouncing back from patio doors to illuminate the trunk of the Yucca, and even a small sunstar on the first image, I was more than happy when I got it back to the computer and viewed them at 100%.  Yes, it needed processing to darken the sky and lighten the foreground but the file stood up well to the necessary Lightroom masking.  Above all, no chromatic aberration, an improvement on the Panasonic 9mm.

In another example I stressed the lens to the utmost with another against the light shot through my shaded central bed into the backlit bananas that are just developing their massive leaves.

8mm and necessary post processing again but the lens stood up well to the high contrast lighting.  

Obviously I'll be doing a great deal more testing to fully explore the capability and flexibility of this new lens but I'm already impressed.  The colour and resolution is all I would expect from an Olympus Pro lens and it certainly fits into my plans to slightly lighten my load by only taking the 8-25mm, 60mm macro and 40-150mm f2.8 (+1.4x teleconverter) when I want to save a little weight but still cover the widest possible range of shots at publication quality.  Yes, there's a gap in the 25-40mm range, but that's hardly a problem that can't be solved by taking a couple of paces forward or back.

Will I keep the 9mm?  Too early to say but, if I don't find myself using it, it will go.

Robin preening

Been a bit busy lately, catching up on some much needed work in the garden, but my resident robin redbreast (Erithacus rubecula) decided to interrupt me by going through a preening ritual while perched on the handle to one of my larger shrub pots.  How could I resist.

Poor thing looked rather disheveled. I know a pair are nesting in the garden and this must be one of the adults looking rather worn out with parenting duties.

All shot with the EM1 Mkii and Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro.at ISO 800.  There wasn't a lot of noise but I used the Adobe DeNoise in Lightroom just in case.  The dark backgrond helps to emphasise the bird though it did need -0.7EV in exposure compensation to illuminate the bird correctly.  I never fail to admire the resolving power of the Pro lens and camera combination.

Spring garden butterflies

The local Plymouth weather has been damp and disgusting over the last few weeks but over the weekend we've had a break and the sun shone for a change.  Out at The Garden House on Friday I was down by a little, bank by the North boundary.  We encourage wildlife in the garden and this little area was filled with dandelions, ideal nectar sources for overwintering butterflies emerging from hibernation.

I captured these three within 2 minutes.

Brimstone butterfly, Gonepteryx rhamni

Comma butterfly, Polygonia c-album

Peacock butterfly, Aglais io

All were taken with the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro, at ISO 800 and f4.  I've used Lightroom denoise on the Peacock and Brimstone, though, at ISO 800 on the EM1 Mkii, they produced acceptable noise results without but gave a slightly smoother background and a little detail enhancement on the subjects. With the bright but hazy light on the day I was working between 1/2500 and 1/5000 of a second, more than fast enough to freeze any movement in the slight breeze.  As I've found in the previous couple of years this combination of close focusing Olympus Pro zoom and EM1 Mkii are ideal for handheld photography of larger butterflies.  Add in Denoise and I'm feeling confident that I can go up to 3200 ISO and still get good, publishable results.  

Looking forward to the summer!

Garden Photography in the rain

There was a time when I hurried to pack the camera away when it rained. I simply couldn't trust the weather sealing on my amateur Canon gear.

Buying into the Olympus system has changed that.  Both my EM5 Mkii and EM1 Mkii bodies and my 12-40 f2.8, 40-150 f2.8 and 60mm macro lenses are decently weather proofed and I no longer feel the need to put the camera away.

Of course there are disadvantages.  Water drops get onto the front elements of the lenses and blur the shots; the eyecup and flipout screen make composition and focusing more difficult; the photographer gets wet, cold and miserable; the light is dim; well, the list could go on forever, but the results can make it worthwhile.

Consider this shot.

I was desperate to try out my newly purchased Panasonic 9mm f1.7 for some wide angle shots at The Garden House but it was sheeting down. Cold, wet, late October Dartmoor rain.  Every photographer's dream.  Nonetheless I braved the weather, dashed around the garden and captured a few shots in the pouring rain.  In this case I like the contrast between the more saturated colours of the foreground and the misty trees in the background.

Rain doesn't always give more saturated colours.  At times it gives a more muted palette to the shot, like a faded watercolour..

When it comes to plant portraits one trick that photgraphers use is to lightly spray the plants with water to enhance their freshness.  No need on the south edge of Dartmoor.  If you can see the hills it's going to rain.  If you can't it's raining.  Let the weather do the work to produce shots like these I took on Monday this week

Narcissus 'Mrs Langtree'

This old heritage daffodil (bred before 1869) naturally nods but the weight of the raindrops accentuates the curve of the stems to produce more attractive compositions.

Or consider the next shot of water droplets on teh emerging leaves of the false helleborine, Veratrum album.  I couldn't get that even a distribution with a spray bottle.

With results like these I'm prepared to brave the rain.  Not that I get much choice at the moment, the local weather is dreadful.

Testing Lightroom Denoise and Blur tools - a first look

With the advent of a new computer* that can more easily handle the increasingly demanding processing power needs of Lightroom and Photoshop (especially combined when I photostack) I thought it was time to try the new AI Denoise feature in Lightroom.  I've always been reluctant to try high ISO photography with my Olympus cameras because noise does increase as I go over 800 ISO.  If Denoise can handle 1600/3200 or even higher ISOs I does extend my range of photography possibilities.

Lightroom also has a new Blur tool.  Still in beta at the moment I thought it was also worth a try to see if:

• I could produce smoother backgrounds to better make the subject "pop"
• reduce the overall noise to clean up the image.

Here's the image; Polyommatus icarus, the common blue butterfly on Geranium 'Salome'.  Taken at f4 at 150mm, ISO 800, with the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro it's actually quite decent untouched apart from normal processing from the RAW file.  (You may need to click on the images to see them at a larger size.)

Noise is certainly present but it's not too bad, even looking at the 100% crop below.  Note the slight graining behind the butterfly's wings.  The overall background is also not quite as smooth as I would like.  (Though the crop is a bit misleading in only showing the bit of the background that is nicely blurred.)

I then applied the Denoise / Enhance tool followed by the Blur tool. At 100% the results are more noticeable than on the reduced size image below but even on this one it's noticeably smoother and less grainy and the background is further out of focus, giving a cleaner appearence that makes the subject stand out more.  More "pop", in effect

The 100% crop of the butterfly definitely shows a cleaner, smoother background, enhancing the differentiation between the subject and the background.

This was only the first test of these two tools and not a particularly demanding one.  But even so, I can easily tell the difference.  The Denoise is certainly memory and processor hungry but even that only took a couple of minutes to process the image.  I'm certainly likely to use these two tools more often.  I still need to test at higher ISO's and images with more demanding background / subject separation needs but that's for when it stops raining!

*For those interested - especially the similarly cash strapped - the new computer is a fairly cheap (£400) BosGame mini gaming PC with AMD Ryzen 5000 processor and Radeon graphics.  32Gb RAM and a 1Tb SSD drive provide the necessary memory capacity for the type of image processing work I do.  It's far from the best available - but it does the job and that's the important thing.  I'd grown very tired of waiting for ages while even a simple stack of 8 images took many minutes to align and merge.  It's now, while not instantaneous, far, far faster.

High angle landscape / gardenscape

Just as a low angle of shooting can give a different aspect to a landscape or gardenscape shot so too can a high angle.

I'm not talking about climbing hills or mountains to shoot downwards to the valleys below.  My specific interest is in getting different views of gardens by getting shots from more elevated positions.

Sometimes it's easy.  This shot of my own rear garden was taken from a bedroom window...

...while this shot of the Sunken Garden at The Garden House was taken from the top of the tower in the walled garden.

As was this shot of the lower terrace of the Walled garden.

But what happens when the ground is flat and you'd like to get a viewpoint above eye level.  Well then I set the camera up on a monopd or a tripod with legs fully extended but unspread, switch on the self timer and hoist the whole thing well above head height.  It takes practice to get level shots that cover the viewpoint you want but it does give a different perspective.  It's like being 10-12ft tall.  For example, images like this:

Yes, there are more sophisticated ways of doing this, but they're also more expensive. So I'll stick to my cheap and cheerful technique and simply delete the duds.

Low angled landscape / gardenscape

We tend to see the world from our eye level, whether standing or sitting.  So getting down even lower adds a new perspective to a view.  I was recently at The Garden House, for one of my weekly visits when I decided to photograph the view across the Arboretum lake.  There's a small cascade at the western end and I wanted to include this, the scene across the lake with white flowered Aponogetum, and the yellow marsh marigolds on the far bank.  

There is access to cascade side and, using the 40-150mm, I was able to get down low enough to frame a shot at 79mm that covered all three features.  It's about 60 yards / metres front to back so I had to focus stack to get it all sharp but I think it works quite well.

I'm finding I use the low angled technique more and more for landcape / gardenscape images.  It plays havoc with my aged back but it does generate some attractive shots with a different perspective to the norm.  

Creating botanical prints

I've always had a liking for the old style botanical prints so have decided to create a few for myself.  

During the COVID lockdowns in the UK I took a number of wildflower portraits against a white background in my improvised home studio set up.  To create the images for the prints I used Lightroom to prepare the original RAW images to my liking and then transferred them to Photoshop to cut out the plant portrait and, using layers, added a graduated green to blue background to replace the original white.  Text layers were then added to provide the titles before  the whole lot was saved and transferred back to Lightroom for final checking and print preparation.

I think they work well for the four I've done so far though I'm still at the experimental stage.  Here's the other two.

Photo stacking and spring bulbs

Much as I enjoy photgraphing early spring bulbs, getting down to ground level can be a strain on my old bones. Thank goodness for flip out screens on my Olympus cameras which means I only have to bend. Thanks also for built in focus stacking which allows me to generate more detailed images with nicely blurred backgrounds.  It did require a nice still day and, fortunately, last Monday provided.  Here's some recent results, all taken at The Garden House.

Chionodoxa forbesii

Narcissus 'Rip van Winkle'

Scilla bifolia

Trillium chloropetalum 'Rubrum'

All taken with either the 40-150mm f2.8 or the 60mm macro, my lenses of choice for plant portraiture.

Carrying unnecessary weight?

There are times I wonder why I bother to carry around a bag full with four lenses and a 1.4x teleconverter and then, having got back to base, realise I've only used one of them.  Wouldn't I be better off leaving the surplus in the car and saving my self the burden of carrying the rest?  After all, there are plenty of advocates of going out with just a camera and single lens, often a prime, and shooting only what worked with that combination.

I recently found myself in that position on one of my regular visits to The Garden House.  And it was not with my 12-40mm f2.8 Pro or the 60mm macro and 9mm f1.7 - though they were in the bag - but with the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro, hardly the first choice most people would think of for a single camera lens combination in a garden setting.

So why did I end up taking all of my shots with this combination?

To produce reults like this:

Magnolia cambellii behind the buildings housing the garage and bothy.  I needed to stand back amd use the lens at 150mm to get the angle and perspective right.  Here's another shot, this time at the 40mm end of the zoom range:

The foreshortened perspective of a telephoto lens gives a more natural look to the image.  Here's another example, also at 40mm:

The juxtaposition of the yellow winter branches of a weeping willow against the thatch of the old barn and the out of focus hedge in front is, I feel, very effective.

One of the shots I'd planned to get was of Narcissus cyclamineus growing beside a stream in the garden.  I knew I'd have to focus stack to get a good depth of field and that there was only one side I could shoot from to get the view I wanted and, again, that needed the long zoom, this time at 70mm.

Although I have permission to go into the beds if necessary I try and avoid it.  And for plants deep in the borders there is often no alternative but to use a long lens.  In my Canon past that would have been the Sigma 180mm macro but now the 40-150mm serves the same purpose.  This is Narcissus 'Jack Snipe' in the middle of a deep border.

One of the reasons for usiing a long lens in flower photography is to produce a nicely blurred background, exploiting the drop off in depth of field behind the subject.  Easy enough when the background is far distant as with this 150mm f5 shot of Magnolia 'Kim Kunso'...

...rather harder when the background is closer.  That's where focus stacking comes in, opening the aperture to get as much background blur as possible.  This Bergenia 'Pink Ice at 150mm, focus stacked with all images shot at f3.5.

So why didn't I use any of my other lenses?  I didn't need to.  The Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro did everythiing I set out to do on that day.  But on another day I'll be swopping lenses like crazy to get the shots that fit that situation.  Looks like I'll have to grin and bear the weight.