Close-up at Botanical Gardens

I was using an  Olympus OM-System 50mm 1.8  legacy lens (lefthand images) on Saturday at the Gardens as I needed some images for a talk I am giving next week. I took most shots with a comparison image using my Fuji dedicated 50mm Zeiss Touit lens (righthand images). I always enjoy the soft pastel colours and backgrounds from the Olympus lens (both are used wide open).

Lackford wide-angle Insects

The only insects that we photographed other than dragonflies at Lackford Lakes were very small insects in a patch of fleabane. No doubt if we had stopped and closely studied other areas, there would have been more small insects and spiders. These are taken with 23mm fixed lens on Fuji X100V with Raynox closeup lens - a lighting system would have been useful as the aperture used was too wide to get adequate depth of field so close.

Wonders of Camouflage

 It has been a busy week with RPS Assessments and continued work on identifying the 100 or so photos from a wildlife survey at Paxton but I have continued with trying to perfect techniques for very small subjects. We have a lot of Tansy and Carrot flower and seed heads in the garden and on close inspection all kinds of well camouflaged insects/spiders live there. Here some plant bugs, a fly and a green spider -each only a few mm long. Using a continuous light panel to be able to shoot with a smaller aperture.

High Contrast Macro

 A combination of my Zeiss Touit 50mm macro lens and a faulty camera that unexpectedly shot jpegs resulted in some very contrasty image that I felt worth sharing. 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The garden has an amazing collection of insects and spiders at the moment - each with its own place in the ecosystem from the snail-killing, gall-making and parasitic/scavenging flies to minute spiders lurking on the tops of flowers and many species of plant bugs some of which also predate caterpillars.

More Shallow Depth of Field Macro

I continued in the garden with a Canon 50mm macro lens on my Fuji so set wide open at f2.5 to give some very interesting closeups.