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.
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| 8mm |
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| 12mm |
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| 21mm |
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| 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.
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