Nature’s beauty

Posted 9:44 pm by infourthirds & filed under Blog.

This weekend was mainly spent indoors due to disappointing weather, but I was determined to get some photography done. My Dad is a keen orchid grower so I headed over to his greenhouse and thought I’d give the Kowa 25mm f1.8 lens a try on a subject matter I’d not really photographed before. Using natural light and my black coat as a make-shift backdrop! I experimented with some of his beautiful specimens.

I think the main issue for me especially when using an f1.8mm lens is to first decide home much of the flower you want in focus – especially with something like an Orchid, keep the Kowa lens wide open at F1.8 and focus on a tiny detail and blur out the rest of the flower – or go for a smaller aperture and keep the flower in focus from front to back. One thing I found with these flowers is that they can be very deep in their structure so I had to think about how I wanted the final image to appear. For me I, rather than focusing on a small area – I opted for more depth of field to at least keep one whole flower in focus whist sill blurring any detail in the background to really emphasise the colour and markings of each orchid.

I thought that this would create more impact, especially on a black background. The Kowa 25mm f1.8 performed extremely well, capturing amazing detail – all the below shots are hand held. The manual aperture and manual focus was really useful and put me in full control of how the final images came out. I also used the focus peaking function on the Olympus OMD EM-1 as well as the focus magnification feature to really fine tune the focus.

I really enjoyed my time photographing these flowers and plan to go back with some lighting and a proper backdrop and do more shots – possibly next time focussing on just parts of the flower instead of the whole subject. Here are a few images from the day – and be sure to check out my flickr page for more pictures.