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.