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.