Spring garden butterflies
Brimstone butterfly, Gonepteryx rhamni |
Comma butterfly, Polygonia c-album |
Peacock butterfly, Aglais io |
Brimstone butterfly, Gonepteryx rhamni |
Comma butterfly, Polygonia c-album |
Peacock butterfly, Aglais io |
Narcissus 'Mrs Langtree' |
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:
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.)
The 100% crop of the butterfly definitely shows a cleaner, smoother background, enhancing the differentiation between the subject and the background.
*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.
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.
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.
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.
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' |
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:
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.
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.
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 |