My garden photography gear and how I use it

It should be pretty obvious that I'm primarily a plant and garden photographer.  I'm also currently 75, reasonably fit for my age, but without the strength and energy of even 10 years ago.  Three to four hours intensive walking and photography in a garden is about my limit and I can't carry a lot of weight.  So I have to be selective in what I use to get the quality shots I need without exhaustion kicking in.

Which has led me to my current Olympus/OM system garden photography line-up.

I use two bodies - not just for redundancy / just in case reasons but to allow me to switch body lens combinations quickly without having to field swap lenses.  The two bodies are the older OM-D EM-1 MkII and the newer OM Systems OM-1, both bought used from MPB.  Both bodies are set up with the focus bracketing I've described in an earlier post, the better stabilised OM-1 with a 5 shot bracket and the EM1 MkII with a three shot bracket.  Both bodies produce excellent 20Mpx RAW files and readily generate publication quality images.  Why two older bodies?  Budget limitations - and they still do the job.  Each body has spare batteries though with my working day limitations I rarely need them for both cameras.

The three lenses I take with me are the :

• OM Systems 8-25mm f4 PRO.  This is my wide angle to normal lens for garden scenes, allowing me to rapidly frame a shot both where space is limited or the vista needs a wide angles approach.  I actually bought this one new during an Amazon sale and it's served me very well in the two years I've owned it.  

8mm

12mm

21mm

25mm

I usually use this lens on the EM1 MkII and, in many cases, with manual focus on (the manual focus clutch is a wonderful thing!).  Why manual focus?  Because with the focus peaking set on I can far more accurately judge whether all the scene is going to be in focus.  And if it's not - well that's where the focus bracketing comes in.  With a wide angle zoom depth of field is large but even then it sometimes needs to be augmented.

• Olympus 60mm f2.8 macro.  Life size reproduction in a tiny, lightweight body with image quality to match my two PRO lenses.  For small flowers, fine detail and, of course insects.

Of course, even with the IBIS of my two bodies close up and macro work needs extra stabilisation, particularly for ground level work like the snowdrops above.  While I carry a full size tripod in the car I often find I can manage with a little Gorilla pod tripod.  It's very versatile and doesn't get in peoples way.

• 40-150mm f2.8 PRO.  My most versatile lens for its ability to isolate subjects against backgrounds, pick out plants at the back of borders or flowers on trees as well as as allowing me to take compressed field of view garden scenes.  Add in the 1.4x teleconverter and I have an effective 420mm close focusing reach.

   

Geranium x oxonianum f. thurstoniana

Tulip tree flowers high in the branches

Snoe

Do I miss the gap between 25 and 40mm?  No.  If it saves me weight it's a very minor limitation requiring only a step back or forward.  Plus I carry a 72mm filter thread circular polarising filter which fits both the 8-25mm and 40-150mm lenses.  One less thing to carry.

I very rarely need more than this.  It all fits in a single, not very large camera bag and comes in at a little over 4kg.  Manageable for me.  And even then I usually distribute the weight a little more easily by taking a separate camera bag with the OM-1 + 40-150mm and teleconverter in one bag, the rest in the other bag, slung on opposite sides of my ageing body.

Yes, I could carry less - but I couldn't get the results that sell my images to books, magazines and papers worldwide.

In which I encounter a Privet hawk-moth

I had my moth trap out overnight yesterday.  Not the best conditions, a bit cool, blustery and, judging by the ground, some overnight rain.  Needless to say I ended up with only two moths in the trap, a Shuttle-shaped Dart, and a Heart and Dart.

Shuttle-shaped Dart

Heart and Dart

Neither spectacular and two I'd photographed before.  Another early morning with minimal results.  There's been a few of those recently as the weather's been a tad unkind.

Then yesterday evening I went out to water the plants and sitting on my hosepipe was a Privet Hawk-moth, Sphinx ligustri, a relatively common hawk-moth but one I'd never seen or photographed before.  Watering could wait.

Out came my normal moth photography kit of OM-1, Olympus 60mm macro, and STF-8 twin flash, set to Manual exposure, 1/250 sec, and f8.  The moth was very amenable to being moved around and posed (I use a feather to avoid any chance of accidental damage) and I got a few decent shots with the usual limitations of not quite enough depth of field.

Sphinx ligustri

But the evening sun was shining so I decided to try some hand held focus stacking while I still had an amenable subject.  The intention was to get some shots from different angles and still have most of the subject in focus.  The soft evening light brought out the colour of this beautiful moth and, with the greater light intensity, allowed me to use the twin flash for fill in without the usual problem of not enough power to sustain continuous flashes in a focus stack.  

I think it worked.

The moth was then released unharmed into the shelter of one of my palm trees

 Uploading images to Alamy

I went out to The Garden House on Monday (for reference 11 May 2026) for my usual weekly photo tour and came back with 812 images.  Of those maybe a dozen will end up on Alamy for licencing.  Why only a dozen?  And what do I look for when deciding which of the 812.

Well firstly there are a lot of files that are part of the type of focus stack I've described in a recent post.  This produces 5 ORF files and a in-camera stacked JPG.  After stacking in Photoshop I end up with a single potentially usable file and six files I don't really need. (though I do tend to keep the ORF files).  Not every shot is part of a stack but enough generally are to significantly reduce the images available for selection.  Of my initial 812 shots 600 may be part of stacks which then generates a potential 100 images to select from.  Quite a few less.

So this...

...is distilled down to this:

A rather nice focus stacked shot of Deutzia x elegantissima 'Rosealind'.  Cropped, cleaned up very slightly to remove a few stacking artifacts, it's now one I'd quite happily upload.

Step two is to discard the rubbish.  Failed stacks, accidental shutter presses, shots that include labels (always photograph plant labels even if it's plants you know well) that are no longer needed after the images have been captioned, poor compositions etc etc.  I'm not looking for images to include.  I'm looking for images to exclude.  

For example this shot of Anthriscus sylvestris 'Ravenswing' with it's good separation of the subject from a pleasant, blurred background that still shows some context I uploaded:

Whereas this one, with its dark and messy background I excluded.  Technically it's good enough to pass Alamy QC.  But it's not going to stand out among the other 130 images of the same subject.  Not all attempts work.

Which brings me to step three.  What is already on Alamy, both my own and others images of the same subject?  Is an image worth uploading? Sometimes it's easy to decide.  Is the image of a new to me subject?  If so, take the best shot(s) I can, process well, caption and keyword accurately and upload as long as I consider they meet Alamy's QC standards.  I ignore the other three thousand images of the same subject unless mine really are inferior and will forever be overlooked.  

Then there are the numerous times when I already have multiple images of a subject on Alamy.  I don't want to compete with myself so any new shots have to be superior to what I've already had on sale for a while.  In which case I seriously have to think about discarding some of my old images and replacing them with the new.

Then there's selection step four.  I generate dozens, if not hundreds, of images of The Garden House monthly.  Do I really want to saturate my portfolio with hundreds of images of just one garden.  No.  A reasonable number, taken through the year, chosen for the light and composition, are far more effective than simply uploading everything that's of a decent technical standard.  And that's another set of images excluded.

So, that's how 812 images becomes maybe a dozen uploaded.  Maybe a few more, oft times less.  But I think it gives me a better, more curated portfolio.