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Friday Slide Show: A Sunny Garden
27 August 2021
Yesterday afternoon as the sun (making a rare appearance here during the summer) was on its way down, we stopped what we were doing, grabbed the Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens, slapped a 4x Lensbaby macro converter on it and went out into the yard.
A week before, we shot with the 10x macro converter. We liked those shots, certainly, but we thought it would be helpful to be able to back up a bit yet still get in close.
The sunny garden provided a lot of subjects to test our 4x setup. Flowers, of course, fruit even. The wild variety of leaves. And, to our surprise, some props that had seen better days.
We didn't think much about it as we shot. We just concentrated on framing the subject in its best light and then making sure we were in focus.
As we worked on the images in Lightroom, we seemed to detect a theme.
On the Olympus's electronic viewfinder everything looks blown out so we didn't worry much about exposure. We moved from f7.1 to f14 to increase our depth of field and stayed between 1/200 and 1/500 seconds with the shutter to fight back against the afternoon wind. We let the ISO wander from 200 to 1250.
It was, surprisingly, a lot of fun, walking around the yard, bending down, leaning over, stretching up and taking photos. The 4x macro gave us a whole new way to look at the same things -- some new, some old.
In the end we wound up with a set of 40 images, half of which made it into the slide show.
As we worked on the images in Lightroom, we seemed to detect a theme.
There were the bright colored images, usually of flowers, and then there were the rather dull images, usually of weathered man-made things.
If there was a vitality to the fruit and flowers, there was a foreboding to the weathered objects. Life ascendant vs. life in decline.
The subject has been on our mind lately as one generation passes and another comes along in the family. And (it hardly needs to be pointed out) as we move up in line.
Somehow we never thought we would. We thought we would be youngsters as long as we cared to be. And only when we got around to it would we be old.
We're learning it doesn't quite work that way.
In the light of a sunny garden in the late afternoon, that much is at last obvious.
