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.

Some thoughts on buying used or older new

Throughout my photographic journey I've always tended to buy used cameras and lenses.  Even where I have bought new I've never been an early adopter, preferring to wait until prices drop from the initial release price.  And drop they do, as inventory makes way for the next best thing, and old stock needs to be sold.  But the prices never drop as far as they do in the used market.

Take a simple case (figures via Camera Price Buster UK).  OM Systems (Olympus as was) have recently released a new flagship camera, the OM1 MkII, available here in the UK for just under £2200.  That instantly made the Original OM1 less valuable, with the price for this now instantly obsolete model dropping to about £1600 from an original £2000.  Even that doesn't compare with the prices on the used market, with like new bodies selling for under £1200, complete with a 6 month warranty.  

And that's when I'll buy one.  At half the original price.

I could repeat this exercise for most of my cameras and lenses, even the ones I've bought new.  A new Canon 300D - my first introduction to Digital SLR photography - for half the original £1000 price after one year on sale.  My initial foray into M43 with an EM-1 and 12-50mm lens for 40% of the original sales price,  The Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 and 1.4x teleconverter bought used for about £500 below the new price.  The list is long.

The truth is that most photographers don't need the latest and greatest.  Top end cameras 5 or 6 years old and used high quality lenses can still perform as well as they did when they were new unless they've been absolutely hammered.  All at a fraction of the price of the latest models.  Unlike the early days of Digital, improvements tend to be incremental rather than revolutionary.  I'll freely admit that I rarely push my now quite ancient used Em1 MkII to it's limits.  It's a better camera than I'm a photographer and more than good enough for the majority of my stock work.  

Even my EM5 MkII (bought used, of course) still functions as well as it did when I bought it and still functions as my backup body.  But it's far more restricted and I can just about justify the need for a newer body.  And with the likely flood of OM1s coming onto the used market as they're traded in for the new model I can see the price of an excellent or even like new body getting below the £1000 mark in the next 6 months.

And that's when I'll buy one.  At half the original price.

Lichens

Curious things lichens, composite organisms where green algae or cyanobacteria live among fungal threads in a mutualistic relationship.  Neither plant nor fungus, they're a complex symbiosis that can cover large areas of suitable substrate when conditions permit.  And the wet South West of England certainly does permit.  So I get plenty of opportunities to photograph them.  Though, I have to admit, I can't identify most of them.

Take these two images of an assortment of fruticose (bushy) and foliose (leaf like) lichens growing on the trunk of Styrax hemsleyana in the cool, damp environment of the edge of Dartmoor air at The Garden House:

They're almost a mini jungle in their own right, using the fissured bark of the tree for support but not sustenance, and supporting smaller organisms such as nematodes, mites and springtails which feed on the lichen growth.

At their most spectacular, some Usnea species even produce long, dangling strands hanging from tree branches in a similar way to Spanish moss in the Southern states of the USA.  

This growth habit requires constantly damp air and lack of pollution and the western edge of Dartmoor offers the ideal conditions.  Hardly surprising, the area was once covered in temperate rain forest, although only remnants still persist but still offer suitable conditions for this type of epiphytic growth.

The growth of all of these is definitely three dimensional and, because of their size, requires focus bracketing and stacking to really capture the full beauty of these lichens or lichen groups.  This image, of one of the lichens I can identify - it's Ramalina farinacea - shows the complexity of the fruticose branching form, set alongside the early spring flowers of the cherry Prunus campanulata 'Felix Jury'.

They do make lovely subjects - and are often at their best at a time when there's not much else to photograph in the winter landscape.  I've shown this one previously - but it's worth showing again just to illustrate the complexity of a shrubby form - even if I'm not sure which lichen it is.

Time to get the identification keys out yet again, methinks.

Al fresco focus stacking using flash

Macro and close focusing work is often limited by available light. The closer the camera gets to the subject the shallower the depth of field for any given aperture, Stopping down helps - with my 60mm macro I can use f9 or f10 without running into more than minor diffraction problems - but that does require adequate light. And in many cases that means the use of flash.  The alternative is to use more open apertures and focus stack multiple images.  But even then flash is often needed.

My Olympus Em1 mkii supports in camera focus stacking using flash - but only under certain parameters.  They are that'the shot limit in the in camera stack is 8 and manual mode (M on the top dial) must be used to set a speed of 1/50 sec to enable the camera to sync with the flash.  Additionally the charge time in the bracketing menu must be set to zero if you want to trigger a rapid sequence of shots.  Olympus flashes do this automatically but I use Godox so I have to set this up.

I would like to use my Olympus STF-8 twin flash for in camera focus stacking but it's not powerful enough to generate the rapid series of flash pulses needed to light eight images in quick succession, essential for handheld or non tripod supported shooting.  I use a Godox TT685o with an 11in softbox angled down to illuminate the subject from above. The flash is set to manual mode rather than TTL to ensure consistency between each flash. A preliminary shot or two allows me to set the flash intensity correctly and I can then switch the bracketing / stacking on.

I'm old, I shake a little, and I'm not as steady as I used to be so handholding can be a little hit and miss.  But the results, when they work, can be superb.

Fruticose lichen, possibly Usnea sp.

Chaenomeles x superba 'Crimson and Gold'

Crumpled leaves of curly kale

Lesser celadine flower

How well it will all work in the brighter light of spring and summer I don't yet know.  But I will find out.  And if it doesn't work - there's always the STF-8

Is Stock Photography worthwhile?

Photography can be an expensive hobby.  Not, perhaps, as expensive as in the film days, when every shot from a roll ate money in film and processing costs.  Nowadays I think nothing of coming home from a day's shooting with an SD card with 300, 400 or even more images captured where, pre-digital, it would be one or two rolls of film, 36 shots per roll.  And, I suspect, compared to some, I'm very economical in my shooting.

Of course there's the cost of equipment - but good quality cameras and lenses were never cheap in film days so the hardware side probably balances out.  And the second hand market is always there to reduce the cost.

But cost there is.  Which is surely why so many photographers try to make an income from their photography - and for many that means shooting for stock.

I still remember my first sale on Alamy.  Heuchera 'Chocolate Ruffles' (above) licensed on 27 June 2014 for the princely sum of $32.76, my share being $16.38.  The first of what I hoped would be a flood of sales.  I'd be rich!  I'd been published (though I never did find out where). I'd be a professional photographer!  Fame and Glory would soon be mine!

10 years later and 2757 images licensed (as of 18 February 2024) at least I can say I've been regularly published.  Rich? No - but currently $23,781.22 better off than if my images had just been sitting on my hard drive.  A professional photographer?  Far from it.  Just an ageing amateur with a bit of skill and the ability to curate and accurately keyword and caption my stock images.  Fame and Glory?  My camara probably gets more credit than I do.

So, is stock photography worthwhile?

For me, yes.  I'm old, Maria and I are both pensioners, and shooting for stock gives me the necessary impetus to get out throughout the year and keep myself occupied - though it does get physically harder as I grow older.  The money pays for my equipment and some travel without upsetting our limited household budget.  But, if I was 30 to 50 years younger, knowing what I know now, would I consider it worthwhile?

No.  It simply isn't profitable enough.  I would need to devote ten times the effort I'm currently expending to make even a paltry living.  I'd need to generate far more saleable images, distribute them among multiple agencies, explore other income streams such as print on demand, hyperactively promote myself on social media and become a slave to the work.  The fun would be gone - and all to make marginally more (possibly less) than minimum wage.

There is too much existing photography floating around the stock photo scene to make a good living solely as a stock photographer.  I'll caveat that to say 'except for the favoured few', because there are people who do make a living from their stock work.  But most don't.  And for them, stock photography isn't worthwhile except as a minor side hustle.  And even then, only if you treat it as a business and identify your market before uploading yet another image to whichever stock libraries you're enrolled with.  

Meanwhile I'll plod on with Alamy as my sole agency.  My latest sale dropped in this morning.  Taxus baccata 'Fastigiata' (above), for the grand sum of $7.40, my share being $2.96.  Doesn't sound encouraging?  It's the lowest of the month to date, my other 12 sales generating $178.99 collectively.

I'll take that - but I'll never rely on it continuing indefinitely.

Panoramas

I like shooting panoramas.  By panoramas I mean images stitched together from multiple shots to produce either a very wide format - as with the shot of Bognor Regis beach above - or wider than normal such as the view of The Garden House in autumn below.

Because I offer my images for sale I don't generally go much wider than 2 or 3 times the normal 4:3 aspect ratio of my Olympus cameras. But sometimes you need to get an even wider view to fit everything in.  This view of the Dart estuary between Dartmouth (r) and Kingswear (l) needed the extra width to show the full stretch of the harbour.

 

Sometimes I use the panoramic stitching simply to generate a higher resolution file than would be possible with the native resolution of the camera.  The image below, of a Devon hedgebank in spring,  has a lot of detail and needed a higher resolution shot than my 16Mpx EM5 Mkii could provide.  I wasn't in a position to shoot a high res shot but I could take an overlapping sequence and merge them later in post.

Which brings me neatly to technique.  

There are many and varied pieces of equipment to generate the sequence of shots needed to generate panoramic images, ranging from simple panoramic tripod heads to full blown motorised gear used to produce gigapixel images.  The aim is to precisely align the individual shots so that they are level and produce a good overlap to allow the software to produce the best image possible.

I don't use any of them.

I often work handheld, relying on the in viewfinder level to keep the images horizontal and then steadily pan across to take a sequence of images that overlap by about a third.  I do not use the autofocus and auto modes (Shutter, Aperture or Program modes).  Excellent though they are for normal use they can far too easily misalign the focal plane and the exposure between the shot sequence.  Manual focus to set a hyperfocal distance for maximum depth of field and manual exposure to meter the brightest part of the planned shot sequence provides a consistent focal plane and exposure between the shots.  

I usually shoot in portrait orientation to generate the maximum height in the final panorama and take as many shots as is needed to cover the full width of the planned final image.  One advantage of using panoramic merging instead of a wide angle lens is the abilty to shoot without the distortion of a wide angle lens.  My 12-40mm f2.8 Pro or the 40-150mm Pro are the lenses of choice, providing the image quality needed without vignetting or the edge curvature from wide angle lenses.

Once in Lightroom I use the Merge facilities in the Library Module to stitch the photos together before processing to my taste.  Whether the results - the image below of Millbay and Plymouth Hoe is another  good example - will ever sell is another matter.  But at least I enjoyed myself.