Sunday, March 24, 2024

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.  

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

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.






Thursday, March 14, 2024

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.